The Old Turk's Load (6 page)

Roth looked at the back of Mundi’s chair and reflected on the shame of it all. Instead of trimming their operation and moving it to Newark, they were running on fumes and Mundi’s ego. Coughing up thousands for a fancy midtown office, feeding on themselves. Instead of parlaying their lucky find into some small advantage with the Mob—something that could be useful to the operation in Newark— Mundi was going to try to sell it out from under them. Roth could practically hear the old man’s brain laboring through its plan. The poor guy actually thought he’d be able to take the money and run.

The whole scenario distressed Roth. He remembered what he’d loved about Richard Mundi, how exciting it had been when the two of them were lean and hungry and on the make. There was nothing Roth wouldn’t have done for him back then. And, in fact, he’d done
most
of it—with a feral sense of purpose and not the slightest twinge of conscience. But as age overtook Mundi, he began backing himself too frequently into corners. Roth’s talents got sucked up into continual damage control—stuff that was unpredictable, potentially dangerous, aggravating. He wasn’t having fun anymore.

The worst of it was, he knew instinctively that feeling this way made him vulnerable. Just like on the football field. If he couldn’t do the job with absolute energy and commitment, he was going to get hurt.

When he thought of the situation in those terms it boiled down to a choice between Mundi and himself, and that was no choice at all. He’d had a wonderful run, but it was over now. That thing with Smoot had been the final straw.

The chair swiveled back around and Mundi regarded Roth. What he saw was a slightly anxious man, but one still ready to deal with the situation in whatever way Mundi thought necessary. Just not ready to figure this thing out by himself. Never ready to take charge, to run the show. Roth would never be anything but a glorified gofer. Mundi sighed, gathered himself, slapped his thick palms on the desk.

“All right, Julie.You shut things down in Newark. Send everybody home for a week.”
“Boss, if you take that smack they’ll kill you.”
Mundi looked at him, said nothing.
Roth considered walking out right then, but it didn’t feel right. So for the fifth time that week, he outlined his plan whereby Mundi Enterprises would go into partnership with DiNoto, returning the heroin and offering the shell of their company as a moneylaundering apparatus for DiNoto’s drug money.
Mundi listened, as he had the first four times, nodding at all the right places. But Roth understood.
“I hear you, Julie. I just don’t want anyone stepping on his pecker over there in Newark until we get this thing resolved.”
“Okay.Then maybe you could take a little break yourself, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. When was the last time you played a round of golf ? You look a little tired, is all.” In fact, he looked like shit.
“Good old Julie.”Mundi regarded him with paternal benevolence, thinking all the while,
I’m gonna whack this guy.
Roth gave him a fond smile.
I’m outta here,
he thought.

Having been looped on codeine for days and locked in utter despair for months, he woke one morning wanting heroin more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.The shit had been abundant all spring and he’d been skin-popping with a comical, growling, scoundrel named Langer. Now supplies had dried up and the Mailman found himself with a gut-gnawing yen for more. Langer wisecracked about getting his health back on a “juice and herbs” diet—booze and grass—but it was no joke to the Mailman. So far, he’d been able to maintain appearances. But he was regularly showing up for work stoned, and he knew he’d fuck something up sooner or later. Even worse, he was already spending his pension check every month on drugs. He had a few thousand dollars remaining in what he referred to as his “retirement fund,” but he knew how long that would last once he started tapping it. Then there’d be nothing left but auto theft, B and E, and who knew what forms of degradation.

Lying there in his sweaty puddle of anguish and need, he realized a couple of other things. He realized that he had to get some smack, and he realized that if he did his life would be over. The cancer hadn’t killed him, but it had opened a door. He’d gone in, and it had been the wrong door. He’d gotten locked in a room where there was nothing but the drugs. He’d been fighting that realization for years; suddenly, this particular morning, the battle seemed over.

The old Turk’s load was whispering in his ear, all the way from Manhattan. But the Mailman still had his pride, and he had the powerful negative example of Langer with which to resist its blandishments. He was damned if he’d turn into a fucking junkie.

He decided to kill himself.
An overdose would be the simplest way but—no surprise, actually—he discovered on consulting his meds that he had only three Demerols left. He lit out for Dr. Paulson’s, found him in, wrote a desperate note testifying to the intensity of his pain and his fears that the cancer had returned, received a prescription as expected, and, once he was back in his car and secure in the knowledge that more awaited, crushed his last three pills and dumped the acrid powder onto his tongue. He was walking out of the pharmacy with a new bottle when they hit, more like a hum than a buzz.
He sat in his car in the parking lot and thought about taking the pills down to Stage Fort Park and making himself comfortable under a tree with a bottle of wine at the edge of Half Moon Beach—looking across the harbor at that lovely view of the city— and grinding them up into the wine. He was sure he could get them all down before he passed out. Then it occurred to him that he might get discovered. What if they hauled his sorry-ass wannabe corpse to the emergency room in time to save him? The only sure way would be to lock himself in his apartment. Nobody would

miss him. Nobody would find him till the stench tipped them off. But the thought of fouling his apartment in that manner disgusted him—sometimes the simplest things got so fucking complicated. Ilda would smell him and she’d be stuck with discovering him.The thought of Ilda brought on an unexpected recollection.

When he’d first moved into his basement the backyard had been a trash-strewn mess. Over the years, working a little at a time, he’d made it into a clear grassy area with a modest garden of tomato plants, squash, and greens. He wasn’t an avid gardener, had no interest in flowers, but the rhythms of turning the soil in the spring and watering each evening comforted him. Besides, he really liked tomatoes. After several years Mr. Menezes, up on the second floor, erected a clothesline out there for his wife who, after several more years, became sufficiently unafraid of the Mailman to hang her wash out while he was in the yard reading the newspaper in his rusty lawn chair. She’d finish, pat her hands into her apron, and stand with him in the sun for a few minutes, smiling silently, since she spoke no English. When he lost his voice they were even.

After his operation the only one who could get a sound out of him was Ilda, the Menezes’ daughter, who’d been born about the time of the clothesline, and probably had been the cause of its erection. She was dark and beautiful and fearless from the first, and liked to play with the Mailman on the days he sat in the yard. She’d just started school when he got the operation, and she questioned him relentlessly, wanting to see the blowhole and the rest of the scar—the upper portion of it was quite visible, despite the Mailman’s post–post office beard—to know if it had hurt, and to get him to demonstrate for her, over and over, how he was learning to replicate speech by manipulating a prolonged burp. She taught him the Portuguese names for all the vegetables in his garden and made him repeat them in burp-talk, until even in the Mailman’s mind kale was no longer kale but
coivsch
.

Being the only fluent English speaker in her family, Ilda had some gaps. Once, after her mother had hung out the wash, and the three of them were in the backyard, she pointed to a bedsheet hanging on the line and asked, “What’s that?” The Mailman, disarmed by the question, made a confused face. Ilda went over and touched the sheet and said in perfectly unaccented American,“This. What’s its name? How do you call it in English?” And he realized it was a word she’d heard around the house in Portuguese but not in English in her first grade classroom. Burping “sheet,” however, was a chore. She knew it couldn’t be “shit” and was hung up on “cheat” for quite a while before she got it right.This was the occasion of considerable laughter; even Mrs. Menezes joined in.

The thought of Ilda and her laugh mixed with the steadying Demerol hit and bumped him off his suicidal groove. He drove from the pharmacy to work, completed his morning chores there, went up to the library, opened the scrapbook of newspaper clippings he’d been indexing, and just sat in front of it, feeling the pill bottle in his pants pocket, considering how close he’d come, how close he still was.

Then, even more unexpectedly—because this time there wasn’t anything as remotely plausible as Ilda to account for it—he broke out of the room he’d been trapped in since his operation, and out of the house that had confined him all his life. It was a giddy tumble and it landed him in the midst of a new world, a new grand scheme. Sitting there in the dusty old library, the light was suddenly different. He drew a deep breath and the air rasping in through his blowhole seemed fresher and cleaner than any air ever had.

elly returned to his office to find his secretary slouched in front of a typewriter.
“Cheer up, Gorgeous. We’ve got a job!”
“Fuck you, Kelly.”
Harry Jarkey was not gorgeous. He was a young, mule-faced

investigative journalist who’d lost what he thought was going to be his career, as well as his marriage, when the
Herald Tribune
went under. Now he freelanced wherever he could, and used Kelly’s office as his own. This was fine with Kelly, who felt he ought to have a secretary but never had enough cases for one. The tidy stacks of documents representing Jarkey’s writing projects looked like the sort of paperwork a busy detective agency ought to generate. And Jarkey was, after all, a highly trained snoop. He occasionally did work for Kelly. It paid better and was more interesting than writing articles on adulterated dairy products for
Newsday
.

In exchange for his use of the office, Jarkey was required to keep track of Kelly’s paperwork. That part was a snap. A brainless brunette with an hourglass figure could have done it. Nor did it bother him that, despite the fact he was not a brunette, Kelly insisted on calling him Gorgeous when he was in a good mood. Jarkey could tolerate the stale joke well enough. It was the glassy-eyed, post-hangover chipperness that drove him up a wall. The detective, perhaps a dozen years older than Jarkey, was something of a father figure. Jarkey couldn’t help but view him with both respect and disdain.

Kelly had come in whistling, still wearing his hat, stinking of aftershave. He’d just made some easy money, or was about to make some easy money, or even
thought
he was about to make some easy money as a private detective. He’d be insufferable now.

In Jarkey’s jaundiced view Kelly, rather than being a hardboiled hero, was multiply addicted and delusional. Kelly himself would have agreed with that diagnosis. Everyone was addicted to something, and delusion was as necessary to life as oxygen.

Kelly dropped Richard Mundi’s file in front of Jarkey, fetched a bottle and two glasses from his desk drawer, spread out the photos and information on Kevin Gallagher and Gloria, and began recapitulating his conversation with Mundi.

“This could be a sweet job, Jark. No heavy lifting. We give him a complete rundown on the lovebirds. Maybe we catch Gallagher actually breaking the law, maybe not. After a while we’ll plant an ounce of grass in his pad and call the cops. He’ll know he’s gonna get fucked, so he’ll jump bail and disappear. End of problem for Richard Mundi.The girl mopes around for a while, then goes back to law school.”

Kelly pushed his hat back on his head,a move he’d learned from Darren McGavin’s TV portrayal of Mike Hammer, and shrugged.
They inspected the photos. Gallagher, haranguing a crowd on the Columbia campus, was a good-looking guy with a thick mustache. Gloria looked mildly pretty all prepped up in her college graduation picture, a little more mature in glasses, a sweater, skirt, and pearls, standing next to her father in front of a Christmas tree. She reminded Kelly of someone, but he couldn’t get a handle on whom.
Mundi had taken the trouble to obtain a copy of Gallagher’s rap sheet. Six months’ incarceration three years before, then nothing much, really, except trespassing and disorderly conduct—civil rights beefs—culminating in his recent arrest at an antiwar rally. The two men agreed he had the look of a committed opportunist. But he did have a record, which Kelly thought would make their job easier. He was feeling good about their prospects. Jarkey was not.
“You think this is going to be a snap. You’re wrong. I happen to know for a fact that Richard Mundi is a sizeable operator. You get caught between him and Gallagher, it’s likely to be uncomfortable. Furthermore, if it really is a family situation, it’s twisted up in a different way. Complexity you’ll never sort out.”
At that moment Kelly recalled his recent, frustrating encounter with Helen Chamberlain. “Harry, I just remembered something. I know these two. I saw them both at a party at Lloyd Chamberlain’s place the other night. And you know what they were doing? They were arguing about the fucking revolution! They’re just babies.They don’t have a clue.”
This elicited a derisive snort from Jarkey. “I still don’t like it. There’s nothing in it but trouble.”
“That, and a cool thousand.” Kelly pulled the wad out of the envelope and fanned it in his face. “On account. C’mon, Jark. Can’t you hear that money talking?”
Jarkey pushed his glasses back up his nose and blinked. “I can hear it. I’m just not sure what it’s saying.”