Sweeney on the Rocks Read online

  “Thanks for coming on short notice, Cosimo. Appreciate it.”

  One of the things Sweeney’s always liked about Anthony? Politeness. We should all judge a man by how he treats his employees. He had a little Bronx in his accent, but none of the attitude.

  “Goddamn crab grass,” he said, settling back, looking fondly at his lawn. “And dandelions. My whole life, I can’t get rid of crab grass and dandelions.”

  “Looks good to me.” In fact, it was a putting green.

  “You’re a good kid.” Anthony drank deep from his tea. Held the glass to his forehead. “I’ll say this quick, then we can catch up. I want to hear about your family. But first thing? We got a problem with Eddie.” The words seemed to pain him.

  Sweeney flashed to any one of Eddie’s half-dozen ongoing sins that the families might object to. “Problem?”

  “He got permission for that thing up in White Plains, so that’s okay. But we hear he’s using too much of his own product. We’ve all seen it, Cosmo. Italians and that cocaine. It’s red Indians and whiskey. Never turns out well.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Anthony nodded soberly. “I know you two are a pair. Everybody knows it. Eddie being strung out hurts nobody like it hurts you.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “You’re a good kid, Cosmo.”

  “Thanks.”

  Anthony reached over and covered Sweeney’s hand with his own. Sweaty, calloused, but a paternal gesture all the same. Paternal first and then, as the hand lingered, disturbing. The pressure of the fingers spoke volumes of mixed messages. “I didn’t just toss that off. I mean it. You’re a good kid. You know how rare that is these days? The business we’re in? You do good work for us, tough work. You do it quick and you don’t make a mess and you keep your mouth shut.”

  “Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate it.”

  “Quick, clean, mouth shut. That’s your secret, Cosmo. That’s why everybody likes you, why everybody gives you work. Eddie, though. Eddie’s in White Plains this afternoon, right?”

  “That’s what I hear.” In fact, it was news.

  “Go on up there. Do him the favor of talking some sense into him. Make him see the big picture.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now. How’s your papa doing? Your mother? They’re well?”

  “Me and Dad, you know about that. But otherwise, not bad, yeah, everybody’s good…”

  Never having gone to trial, Sweeney never had the satisfaction of due diligence. Never got to learn exactly how the cops knew what they knew. But it surely started at Anthony’s. Of course they’d have Acerbi under surveillance.

  Sweeney’s a small timer, but you show up at Anthony’s and leave in a hurry, you’re drawing some kind of attention. Anybody with half a brain should have realized that Sweeney would be picking up a tail, wiretaps, e-mail hacks. Sweeney should have known (of course, of course) that various crime units were already pinning his photo to their corkboards.

  ~

  “I’ll get us an Uber,” Sweeney has his cell phone. Glances at the readout. “Oh man. Battery.” The dissembling feels false, his voice inflectionless in the wrong way. He ain’t no kind of actor, but Tina’s oblivious.

  “We can walk.” She touches an eye with a fingertip. Now that they’re out on the street, a sense of propriety has outmaneuvered her grief. Sorry, Georgie. Life goes on.

  “Cobble Hill?”

  “Back up Park Slope.”

  “After you.” He’s managing to maintain a superficial kind of calm, but inside he’s screaming: Go. Get a move on, move your ass, go, go, go.

  Ten minutes of brisk walking, they’re on 5th and Garfield. Sweeney holds the door open for her. Nine o’clock in the morning and the air-conditioned bank’s already a relief. “Boxes are downstairs.” Past a couple tellers and an ATM, a long flight of stairs.

  Sweeney watches Tina sign her name to two different ledgers. A rent-a-cop in the corner digs a fingernail into his teeth.

  Three minutes later, two sets of keys hang off the box’s silver door. Tina hooks her fingers through the wire handle. “You ready?”

  “Just get the stones. Jesus.”

  Tina’s inclined to pout, but then yeah, she agrees. Not the time nor the place. She extracts the box and sets it on the bank’s gray marble table. Opens the lid.

  Inside, a black velvet bag, cinched tight. A cheap bag, like something that might come with a board game to hold the pieces.

  Tina’s fingers fumble at the string. Then she tips the bag gently toward the marble. Shakes it. Shakes it again.

  ~

  What Sweeney don’t know about diamonds is a lot. But he knows that he don’t know, which, as they say, is the beginning of wisdom.

  Mostly he knows what you pick up off the street, the lingo of the part time larcenist. You walk into a pawnshop with rocks pried out of a setting, they’ll talk about cut, clarity, color, carats. They’ll mention moissanite and heat conductivity. How the value in a stone comes from the purity of color, the flawlessness. If there are enough inclusions in the meat, it’s the difference between gem quality and that Nigerian bort shit they put on drill bits. On the other hand, if it’s too pure, too perfect, that means it’s fake. The trick with gems, you’ve got to walk that line between perfect and not too perfect.

  Most of all, though, Sweeney knows that diamonds are better than cash. Untraceable and unaccountable. They leave hoof prints filled with blood and tears (a pile of loose stones like this would have come into the moment pulling contrails of violence, regret, retribution), but they’re diamonds. Antwerp, De Beers, Israel, New York on West 47th between 5th and 6th.

  That’s what he knows.

  What he don’t know, but might have read online, is that the state-sponsored diamond company in Russia, Alrosa (and like every other diamond company in the world), has had problems with overproduction. Diamonds are only worth a shit because people think they’re worth a shit. Rarity is essential to the perception of value. And rarity, for a number of years, has been an artificial condition. De Beers started it, Australia did a riff on it, Russia followed the leaders. They’ve all been overproducing then hoarding.

  A good business plan. Until.

  Until the bottom drops out. And then, when a lack of demand collides with oversupply? It’s like Wile E. Coyote spinning his legs off a cliff. Everybody starts waiting for that moment when the mutt glances down, for him to zip toward his inevitable coyote-shaped crater.

  So let’s say you’re Vladimir Putin, with some national pride built into two big diamond mines, Mirny and Udachnaya, and let’s say you’ve got Alrosa with a couple acres worth of good rough catalogued in file cabinets (billions of dollars worth of stone, just sitting there chilled). Given that you’re always open to some collegial bribing, when they come to you hat in hand and with some good solid grease under the table, you do the right thing. You keep Alrosa solvent. You buy $1 billion worth of rough.

  That’s all public knowledge. What’s not public (but available between the lines), is what happened on the predictable QT. A mid-level Moscow bureaucrat defects to the states. He’s got one eye on Cape Cod and another on Palm Beach. Tied up with the Solntsevskaya Bratva, two years out of Butyrka, he steps off the plane with a bag full of rocks and a list of American contacts who might help a bratan out. A short list of wiseguys with the juice to not only move this kind of ice but the connections to make it worthwhile.

  Next thing, a body’s bumping up between the piers. Tattoos and powder burns on the temple. It’s CSI time, albeit with less photogenic lab rats.

  After cutting off the shirt, scoping out the domes of Annunciation in chromium and cobalt, they could give exactly less than one shit about the body. What’s another gangbanger, more or less? Granted, more exotic than most, but a gangbanger nonetheless.

  Next case.

  This is all good theory.

  What’s not theory is the tumbling cascade of stones just now under Sweeney’s nose.
/>   Focusing on them, it’s like looking through a child’s kaleidoscope, a cardboard tube pointed to the light, twisted and twisted again. Octahedrons and dodecahedrons, high quality roughs polished along the flat faces. Glassies.

  Jesus, though, the way his mind works? First thing that pops into his head is a strip club. Girls, girls, girl. A beautiful woman rotating around a bronze pole, just out of reach. Also, cocaine. His old Caddy. Springsteen and a Colt .44 cold between his legs. Next, he winces at the thought of the chintzy-ass stone he just bought Aggie. A fragment of a fragment, a shard of a shard. Compared to this.

  This is like. It’s like. Jesus. It’s like standing in a long line for the water fountain when you’re ten years old, then that first, cold, impossibly sweet rush of water down your tiny little parched throat. It’s like stepping out of the car after fourteen hours on the Interstate, that delicious stretch of your legs. It’s like seeing your whole life spread out on a table, steaming on silver platters, dripping grease. His life, man. Right here.

  He does a quick count while Tina watches, waiting for a reaction. Mentally divides the pile into quarters. Maybe fifteen or sixteen stones per quarter. Maybe another half dozen in the thicker cluster in the middle. Call it seventy uncut diamonds, each one fifteen to twenty carats. The biggest, maybe thirty.

  On the low end of blackmarket wholesale, he’s looking at two and a half million dollars. High end, maybe four million. Average it out: Three million.

  Much less, of course, than rumor and wishful thinking might have had it. But still. Three million dollars.

  What Sweeney needs right now is a certain kind of certainty of purpose, a daunting professionalism. For Aggie. For Elizabeth.

  He takes the edge of one hand and pushes the stones into a pile. Feeds them back into the bag. Quickly.

  “Cosmoo…” Tina draws it out like she’s dangerous.

  He twists the string tight around the bag. Drops it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No, no, no way, no…” Tina claws for his jacket.

  “Scene,” he hisses, jerking his head toward the guard.

  “Cosmo…” Plaintive now.

  “We’ll call us a car. We’re going to Midtown.”

  His certainty minimally reassures her. “Midtown?”

  “Fifty-seventh and Lex.”

  “Your fence?”

  He half nods.

  “Ohhhkay….” She keeps her eyes on his jacket. “I guess that’s okay.”

  ~

  He’s rehearsed the next stage in his head. After that he’ll go by instinct. He used to be good at instinct.

  Step one: Out on the street, he produces his cell phone. Pretends to be frustrated (again) by the dead battery. “Borrow your phone?”

  Tina hands it over without a second. An older model iPhone. Sweeney slips it into his hip pocket.

  And yeah, that’s pretty much the end of his plan.

  Here’s Tina for you. Dumb enough to give him her phone, smart enough to natch immediately to her situation. According to the strictures of this particular game, she’s already a pawn to the disadvantage. Nine thirty in the morning on a Brooklyn sidewalk, they’re facing off. Three million dollars is the board.

  “Cosmo…”

  “My fence, this guy, he’s nuts.” Sweeney plays it calm and reasonable. “I can’t have you tagging along in the back seat. You understand, right?”

  “No, yeah. Give me my phone, Cosmo. For that matter, give me my goddamned diamonds.”

  “This goes wrong, it goes waay wrong.” He turns a hip towards her, lets her glimpse the bulge in the small of his back. “You want to be an accessory?”

  “So you drop me off at the corner.” Tina’s starting to sweat it, begging. “I’ll watch from half a block away.”

  “We’re not playing here, Tina. This ain’t amateur hour.”

  “I’ll scream. Right here. I’ll scream my goddamn lungs out.”

  “Okay. Listen. You go find you a burner phone.” Maybe he’s conceding something. “Call your cell. I’ll call you back, give you updates. Where I am, what I’m up to. Every ten minutes, twenty minutes.”

  “You won’t fuck me over, Cosmo?” Pleading now. “You’re going to fuck me over, aren’t you. Just say it. Let me hear the words. Say you’re going to fuck me over.”

  “Tina. I’m doing this for you, Eddie, for all of us.” The thought of his cousin puts a genuine mist in his eyes. “It’s just, I need to do it solo.”

  Necessity provides the tipping point. She wants to believe. “Swear?”

  Jesus, she’s buying it. “Swear. On…everything. I swear on those two good years we had together. By how much we used to love each other.”

  It’s all too much for her. Georgie and her own grief. The tensions of the last two weeks. Now Sweeney playing an unpredicted ace. Did he say love? She visibly wilts, settles back on her heels. “You swear?”

  “Swear.”

  And this is how, five minutes later, he’s sitting alone in the backseat of a Lincoln town car, three million dollars in his jacket pocket. Couple days ago he was digging around for the last fry in the bag, wearing seventeen dollar Carhartts. Now he’s in Armani and burping Brooklyn Thai, the price of a Montana ranch trembling next to his heart. He says to Ahmad, his new driver, “Find me a place where I can rent a car. Hertz, Alamo, whatever.”

  “National?”

  “National.” Sweeney puts his hand patriotically over the smooth lump of diamonds. Feels them pulse in three-quarter time. Lacrimoso. “National.”

  ~

  By Sweeney’s read, the only way Aggie and Elizabeth have a shot? He’s got to find a way to put Breetvah’s balls in a vice. Maybe he kidnaps somebody near and dear. A wife, a daughter? They’ll do an equitable exchange. Two warm bodies for two warm bodies.

  Problem is: What’s he know about Breetvah? Nada, buptkus, zippo. Does the guy even have a wife, a daughter? His only connection to Breetvah was Bytchkov. And that bridge, for obvious reasons, is burnt. But there’s another connection as well. Tina.

  Even odds? The men who trashed Tina’s house are the same bastards who killed Eddie. Breetvah and his crew.

  Maybe Sweeney pays a visit to Tina’s house. Takes a look. Sees if it offers some insight, some clues.

  Thinking that word, Sweeney gets punched in the gut by his own impotence. What is this, the fucking Hardy boys?

  Still, he’s got to do something. Until he gets the next phone call, until he is specifically held accountable for the rocks in his jacket, he’s got to make some kind of play.

  Bensonhurst, she’d said. Seventy-second. Nice little red brick townhouse. Big windows on the second floor. Good parking.

  National had given him a Honda CRV. Little four-cylinder with the zero-to-sixty pick-me-up of a hamster wheel, a smell inside like cat piss and mildew. But it’s anonymous, which he likes. Driving through Brooklyn, Sweeney lights a smoke. Rolls down all four windows.

  Twenty minutes later: You know how many red brick townhouses there are on Seventy-second? A lot. Why couldn’t she have given him a cross street. Seventy-second and…?

  Sweeney pulls off to the curb to start up Tina’s iPhone. She’ll have her appointment book in there, maybe some addresses. Confirmation e-mails from Amazon.

  But, no. The first screen is the four-digit pass code. Which is disappointing though not a catastrophe. Nothing’s ever easy.

  Just for shits and giggles, not expecting much, he punches in Tina’s birthday. She was born in August eighth, so he tries 0808. No. Too much to hope for. The year was 1978, so next he tries 0878. Of course this doesn’t do it, either. How about Eddie. Born on…what. March 15? So 0315. And, nope. Sweeney? Hell, why not. For nostalgia’s sake, he punches in his own numbers. September 12 makes for 0912. Of course, no.

  Okay, think.

  There was a pizza joint a few blocks back. Eddie’d always had an appreciation for good pie. Sweeney pulls a U-turn and finds the storefront
. Calls the number on the awning. It’s early, but not so early that they shouldn’t be gearing up for lunch.

  “Yeah, Dave’s.”

  Sweeney puts on a not-bad cousin Eddie impersonation. A nasal twang, a hoarse undercurrent of ready-to-be-pissed. “Yeah, hey, this is Eddie Adamo, and I…”

  “Eddie! Jesus, man. I heard, we heard, well, Jesus, man. How you been? You doing okay?”

  Taken aback, Sweeney wings it. “Yeah, yeah. Those rumors, right?”

  “Man, I can’t even…wow.”

  “Yeah, so I need a pie. I got people, they’re gonna be here inside of ten minutes. Hungry after an all nighter, yeah?”

  “I gotcha. What kinda pie?”

  “One of those supremo ones. All the shit. Just drag it through the garden. No hot peppers.” Sweeney remembers this about Eddie—no jalapenos. “Big as they come. You get it here inside fifteen minutes, I’ll tip an extra twenty.”

  “You got it.”

  “You got my address, right?”

  “You still at…?” A brief rustle of paper. He reads an address. Another two blocks east.

  “That’s it”

  Five minutes later, Sweeney’s idling slow past Eddie and Tina’s little house, keeping an eye out for surveillance.

  Red brick, right. Otherwise, Tina was full of shit. Two stories, narrow as a ladder, cornice bricks crumbling like cake. Fifty years ago it might have been picturesque. Maybe the front yard used to be filled with roses, peonies, violets. Now it’s bean trellises and corn stalks. Broken gutters staining the walls like hair gel melting out of a hat.

  From the west, he sees nothing suspicious. The house comes up on his right…then it’s gone. Still nothing.

  Feds would be hardest to spot. They’d have a room rented with a sightline to the front door. Wire taps, shotgun mikes, cameras. But if this place is hot to the Feds, Sweeney’s fucked no matter what. It’s therefore an unproductive worry, the Feds.

  If it’s Moretti, he’d have assigned a couple soldiers. But your typical wiseguy lasts about five minutes on a stakeout. They get bored, ask what their bosses ever did for them, go buy each other drinks at the nearest bar.