Sweeney on the Rocks Page 20

  Counts Enemies glances at his phone. “Where’s Jack Creek?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Your phone’s at the head end of it. Who’s your pal?”

  “Not sure it’s my place, man.”

  Counts Enemies touches Merchant on the arm. Points two fingers at his own eyes. An opaque, unreadable gesture. By the friendliest interpretation? “Hey pal, it’s me. You can tell me anything.” But the more likely version? “Drop me off the side of the road, then, and fuck you.”

  Merchant says. “Ted Sweeney. Ten years ago, he was mobbed up back in Brooklyn.”

  “Sweeney? No shit.”

  “You know him?”

  “Hell yeah. He installed a sprinkler system for my cousin a few years ago. Nice guy.”

  “Nicest guy. Used to be a trigger for the Gambinos.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, so now it’s all catching up.”

  “His girlfriend got snatched?”

  “Aggie. Her teenage daughter as well.”

  “So the kidnapper’s phone is up Jack Creek?”

  “Yeah.”

  Counts Enemies reaches into the black gym bag between his feet, pulls out an FBI standard Glock 22, .40 caliber, 15 rounds. Releases the magazine to check the load. Opens the slide and blows air theatrically through the mechanism. And for the first time since he’s known him, Merchant sees the man smile. A brilliant, beatific, sunshine-through-clouds kind of grin. You can’t help but return it. “Well, ohkay then.”

  Here’s the thing about Eddie Adamo.

  Jealousy.

  That’s it, what you need to know. His whole life, the guy’s one jealous sonofabitch.

  Take cousin Cosmo, for instance. Cosmo had stability. Born with a silver spoon full of it. Mother, father, sister, they all sat down to dinner. Cosmo’s old man was a little hardnosed, sure. But he was there.

  The flip side? Eddie’s dad split early, fleeing in fits and starts. He was a weekend dad, then Christmas and Easter. An address and a phone number in the Bronx. The smell of bourbon and Old Spice equals, to this day, childhood nostalgia. Ten, eleven years old, Eddie’d see small families at street fairs, parades. Mom and Dad swinging a toddler up by the hands. “Whooopsie daisy.” And his first thought? “T’hell with all you people.”

  An only child, Eddie suffered from an ailment common to that species, the arrogance that arises from being the sole and unwilling, helplessly-addicted recipient of his mother’s affections. An Italian of that postwar generation, a woman whose formative years were defined by want, by need, Zita Adamo saw heftiness as virtuous, as something to achieve. The woman waddled through her late thirties and early forties, a gradually ballooning Zeppelin of closely-held tomato sauce recipes, strong opinions about the second Vatican council, and an infatuation with all things Kennedy. There were two men in Zita’s life: young Jack-Jack and her son Eddie.

  From thirteen, fourteen, Eddie hit the streets. What’s school got to teach him? Algebra, biology, Hemingway. The fuck ever, man. I’ll be over here. He was the ghost in his mother’s apartment, leaving before breakfast, home after dark. A presence that shut doors soft behind him. Lingering only long enough to recharge the batteries of his ego, depleted by an uncaring world. A pinch of a cheek. And, “You so bello, intelligente. You got a girlfriend yet? No? Kay. No one in this America good enough for bello.”

  Eddie on the street. He’s got the mullet and the comb, a heart on his thigh tattooed with a needle and Bic ink. Here’s a kid who never let nothing show. He’s got more layers than geology. He’s got rings like an oak tree. Instead of sap he bleeds scorn. How’d he get this way? Nature or nurture or what?

  Take a moment, any moment. Pick one. The March he turned eighteen. A Pisces, sure, but that whole fish and water thing? Passive and sensitive? Bullshit. Kid was a bull, maybe a crab, singlehandedly turning the astrology racket up on its ear. A day with a late spring snowstorm. Heavy, wet flakes, hitting hard, and Eddie had his jacket tented up over his head, running for the tire shop.

  Ten minutes late, he grabbed his overalls off a hanger, tried to make himself inconspicuous as he hopped on one foot, pulling them on. Then, yeah, there was that knock of metal against glass, the Nose in his office. Waving Eddie up.

  So. The tire job? Good while it lasted.

  Eddie passed Cosmo with his broom. Gives him a shrug. What’re-you-gonna-do.

  “Boss, hey, this snowstorm, I just…”

  “Sit down. Shut up. You want coffee?”

  “Sure, uh yeah. Boss.”

  They kicked back with Styrofoam cups. Nose considered his philosophically. “You’re a good kid.”

  Eddie double clutched. Getting fired to maybe getting promoted. “Thanks, boss.”

  “You got ambition, yeah? You want a go places, work your way up the ladder, am I wrong?”

  “You ain’t wrong, boss.”

  “You know how to keep your mouth shut.”

  “You ain’t wrong again.”

  “Yeah, uh huh. So I got me a…delicate kind of situation over by Coney Island.” He sipped his horrible coffee. Made a face at it.

  “What’s that, boss?”

  “Gimme a second, Jesus. I’m thinking how to put it into words.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  Turns out, the Nose was Shylocking. Small timing it with some micro loans. “What a pain in the ass.” A pain compounded by the restrictions of turf. How he couldn’t step on nobody’s toes. “Everybody and their brother’s already got their territory, yeah? So if I want to get into this particular business, I got to go where nobody else wants to go. Brighton Beach.”

  “The Russians, boss?”

  “Just one so far, but yeah.”

  Turns out, he had this barber with a mysterious debt, some yid from eastern Yovakiastan. “The guy’s stiffing me. Not even returning my calls.” But the Nose couldn’t let loose his usual apes. “The Russians, is why. They have their own thing. Somebody’s cousin’d be burning down my tire shop.”

  Long story short, he wanted unintimidating Eddie to go put some pressure on the guy. Classic Nose kind of move. Subtle. A couple different agendas. Test Eddie, get the money, send a message. “You’re shaving already, yeah? Go get a hot towel treatment. Maybe you talk to him about paying his bills, maybe you don’t. You’re a kid. He ain’t going to feel like I’m threatening him or nothing. Then you come back, tell me what you seen. We’re moving in slow on this one.”

  Eddie had been to Brighton Beach one other time, when he was maybe eight or nine. There was some kind of hazy memory. A Coney Island day that got rained out. Couple hours spent looking for a candy store from his dad’s own youth. “They got a fountain of chocolate. A fountain.”

  Anyway, he heard the place had changed. One thing to hear about it, though, another thing to see it firsthand. Jesus, man. Look at the signs. Gorbachev, cold war, Reagan. Goodwill Games. But these commies still had the balls to put up store awnings in Cyrillic? Thirty-three odd letters each one like a phlegmy commie flag, waving out over Eddie’s beloved Brooklyn.

  Nose gave him a Neptune Avenue address. Hoodie up tight, boombox under one arm, Eddie ambled past a wedge of narrow storefront, squeezed between a deli and a dry cleaners. No awning, but a crude paper sign taped across the window, blocking most of the glass. Half a dozen Russian letters in Sharpy scrawl. A crude pair of scissors drawn as if by a sixth grader. One o’clock in the afternoon, the lights were on inside, and shadows move past. Off the bottom edge of the paper, Eddie glimpsed wingtips.

  Eddie squatted on a square of sidewalk across the street. Tipped an old man’s fedora up beside his boombox and dropped his forehead on his knees. Punched play on a tape of Rachmaninoff. A ray of sun spotlighted just another junky kid angling for change.

  Over the course of the next five hours, Eddie earned twenty-three dollars in nickels and dimes, and counted thirteen Russian soldiers rotating through the barbershop. Six of them wore track suits, lemon yellow to blood orange. You can’t
buy taste, and it don’t take a genius to spot a racket. Nobody was getting haircuts. Nobody was coming out preening, touching their new dos. They were all younger men, mid-level and lower. Most with the heavy lips and prominent brows of eastern Europe. It wasn’t Christie Tick’s over across from Dyker Park, that’s for sure. Bush league, is what it was. The Nose didn’t have nothing to worry about, was Eddie’s opinion.

  But then this last guy? A garish, rust-red sport coat that matched his pants. A flash of gold watch. Twenty pounds overweight, and he took his time with an affected cane. Enjoying the day. He paused at the storefront, glanced at the time, stepped down inside. By Eddie’s own Timex, thirty-two seconds passed before he was back out on the street, making an envelope disappear.

  The barber was either paying up the ladder or paying off debts. Given the day’s rotating thugs, Eddie’s bet was that he was paying up. So Nose might have a problem. Competition for the yid’s wad from some well-connected pinko.

  Eddie pulled himself off the pavement, pocketed his loose change, set the fedora firm on his head. Gave it a tilt. Ambled across the street and pushed into the barbershop like he owned the place.

  Confidence, kid.

  In coming years, elder Eddie, the blood-smeared creature with a rap sheet ten yards long and enough chutzpah to flood the streets of New York, to soak the city like Sandy, he’ll look back on this moment with a nostalgia typically reserved for puppies and babies, weddings and graduations, beautiful moments long, long gone.

  Ten minutes since the Russian capo left with his cut, Eddie found the barber still collapsed in a swivel chair. Head in his hands. Red hair gone gray in a greasy combover. He looked up at Eddie with red-rimmed eyes. “What you want?” A thin man, short, but with a voice deep enough to startle.

  “I’m here from the Nose. We need our money.” Nothing subtle or artful. Gimme money.

  The barber was unsurprised. The world kicks you when you’re down. “I no got it.” He dropped his head into his hands.

  Eddie felt dismissed. “That don’t matter. We need it.”

  Without looking up, the man made a gesture with one hand. “Shoo. Leave. Little boy, go home.”

  Little boy? Yeah, no. Not the right thing to say.

  Eddie glanced around for a handy bludgeon, too flustered to see much past his own umbrage. Decided on a simple smack up the head. “Old man. Money?”

  But then…just like that, the spritely old turd had Eddie’s wrist and had him twirled (with a clatter of combs and scissors) up against the mirror. Fingers wrapped around Eddie’s windpipe.

  “All you people. All, all the same.” Despite the strength of his grip, the old man started to tear up. “Take a man who works his whole lifetime and…suck him dry…tear him apart. Apart!”

  Eddie’s left hand pried helplessly at the old man’s fingers. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs started to burn and his tongue grew thick. His right hand played a frantic piano riff down the shelf, searching. Came up with a straight razor resting in soapy water. He brought the blade around with a warm splash, a seminal jet of foam.

  His first grip on the thing, he only got the handle, and so the blade swung back loose. But it was still enough to trace a line of red on the barber’s cheek. Enough for the old guy to loosen his grip. Enough for Eddie to find a purchase, really get to work.

  Using Jasha’s keys, Sweeney locks the warehouse behind him. Turns to face a blinding Brooklyn morning. Nearly lunchtime. Cars idling by, and a distant hum from the BQE. Improbably, it’s still just an average American day. Another in a near-infinite series.

  Some consolation to think that his was almost certainly not the most evil act committed in the borough this morning. Indeed, according to a certain Old Testament, Hammurabi view of justice, what Sweeney did was downright righteous.

  Ambling slow toward his rental car, he holds this fragile thought as long as he can, tends to it like a lit match in the wind. On the way, he lets Jasha’s keys slip discretely into a storm grate.

  He gets in his Honda, pulls away from the curb, studious with his blinker. Five blocks along, he wads up the cap and jacket and dumps them in a public trash bin. Two blocks after that, he finds another bin for the blood-spotted chamois cloth.

  The smart money would tell him to get rid of his pistol, and as soon as possible. But not yet. Just…gimme a minute. He’s shaky, and finds street parking on Verona beside Coffey Park. Lights a cigarette. Stares.

  You’re out there in the blue, Sweeney. A smile and a shoeshine.

  Eddie was Breetvah? Fuuhhuck me running.

  Is Breetvah?

  Breetvah, who has kidnapped Aggie and Elizabeth. Couldn’t be. Why would he?

  If true, it changes things.

  What reason would Jasha have to lie? No reason. Although and of course, people don’t need a reason.

  If true, it changes…everything. It also, yeah, makes a certain kind of venomous sense.

  One of Eddie’s own theories: Nobody knows nobody.

  It’s the kind of meaningless axiom we stumble across twenty times a day. Never rains but it pours, a bird in the hand, takes one to know one. But accept this little chestnut at face value—nobody knows nobody—it’s enough to kill you slow, drown you in crushed ice, burn you from inside out.

  Seven billion people in the world, and all of us preaching, kissing, fucking, juggling on stages and texting in cars, begging to be appreciated, praised. Alarums and excursions, flattery and insult, thieving and giving, fistfights and hugged reconciliation, and yet we’re all still hidden from each other. A wife votes Democrat, never telling her Republican husband. A priest delivers the host with a tremble, but jerks off three hours later with jumper cables clipped to his nipples. The brutish football coach likes to slip, evenings, into his wife’s panties, and a beloved cousin, your wingman, the confidante of your life, moonlights as a Russian psychopath.

  Save it for later, Sweeney. It don’t help you with Aggie.

  Unless it does.

  Among the various ambushes of the past forty-eight hours? Jasha’s comment about Bytchkov lighting a candle for Sweeney’s death day. August 12.

  He’s been inclined to resist the notion that his death was unduly meaningful. Sure, there are a few out there to whom his existence meant something. His mother, sister, Eddie. But everybody else? Forget about it. What’s that saying? The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.

  Tina’s phone sits face up on the seat beside him.

  What the hell. They had a thing.

  He hits the starts button. Gets her password screen. Punches it in…0812.

  And sonofabitch, it works. Just like that, her phone’s alive in his hand. A window into her life. Bank accounts, browsing history, Facebook. Just like that, he’s got it all.

  With the tip of one thick, ungainly finger, he touches an e-mail icon. Inflates a list of her most recent messages.

  First three are from Gap, Pottery Barn, Macy’s. Light blue, and unread.

  Below them, a personal note. The text in gray, having been opened.

  Adamo, Eddie

  RE: Georgie

  Yesterday, 11:32 PM

  “Sorry about your brother. We’ll take it out of Moretti’s ass. Text me after you get the stones. E.”

  Eddie.

  Cousin Eddie, who moonlights as Breetvah.

  Breetvah, who has kidnapped Aggie.

  That Eddie?

  That Eddie.

  Playing the same note (revenge as consolation) that Sweeney had offered Tina in the hotel room. And even through his umbrage, his sense of betrayal, Sweeney enjoys this slight, serendipitous connection to his cousin. Great minds, and all that.

  The initial spray of barber’s blood ebbed fast: a shower to a leak to a dribble. The old man was astonished, then not. Acceptance faded to melancholy. His eyes fixed on the blade in Eddie’s hand. The sight drew a smile. It’s how he’d made his living, right? That razor? Which made his an ironical kind of death. He breathed one last, effortful word, t
he syllables bubbling up past his larynx: “Breet. Vah.” Then stiffened. Died.

  Eddie, on the other hand, was as alive as ever. Bloody as a newborn. He’d done it. Finally, thank you, Jesus. He’d made it. Entered the ranks of the truly badass. Murderers. Big time, man.

  From this moment, he will trail behind him—in the manner of all murderers—an entire civilization of poorly paid detectives, tired forensic specialists, hack journalists, memento collectors, mourners, macabre mob aficionados, an invisible bleacher’s-worth of…devotees? A good word. He’ll take it. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, who will find themselves in some ways devoted to this moment.

  Assuming he could get away with it. So first thing? He walked to the door. Left some bloody sneaker prints but nothing to be done about that now. Remember it for next time. Shoe covers like nurses wear. He covered his fingers in his sleeve and twisted a deadbolt, locked himself in. Turned off the lights. A pool of blood around the barber went metallic in the dusk.

  Next thing? Wash your hands, face. He pulled off his blood-stained hoodie. Found a garbage bag full of hair. Dropped the hoodie in, twisted the bag tight.

  Final thing, misdirect. Give those legions of cops something to chew over. Some place to look other than the Italianos.

  It needed a pen, or a pencil. A brush. A shaving brush. Write something. Something in Russian. What’s he know from Russian?

  Vodka, Stalin, Leningrad.

  Breetvah.

  He dabbed the brush into the pool of barber blood. Touched it to linoleum and made it halfway through the capital B before his ink ran out. Dabbed it down again. Got creative with the double Es.

  It took him about ten minutes and most of the blood, but then…well done. Well done.

  Then: What the fuck’s it mean?

  He found door keys in his barber’s pocket. Dumped the brush in the bag with his hoodie. Unlocked the door, locked it again behind him. Head down. Play it casual. New York at dusk, nobody notices nobody.

  His dark pants glittered under streetlights. Stay away from the subways.

  A city full of the petty criminals, pickpockets and shoplifters, gangbangers playing it tough and tough guys falling flat. Bartenders aspiring to bodyguards and bodyguards playing sycophants until they can segue to extortionist. None of that’s Eddie. Not anymore.