Greenmantle (2 page)

“Check out back!” one of the dark-suited men ordered, but they already had men out there and he knew no one was going to get through them.

The intruders fanned out through the villa, shooting into closets, then ripping the doors open, kicking apart the beds, checking any place where a man might hide. But they didn’t find a thing. Then word came from the back of the villa that both Jimmy Civella and Happy Manzi were dead and did Fucceri want them to check the fields?

“Sure, sure,” Louie Fucceri said. They didn’t call Papale the Silver Fox just because of his hair. It wouldn’t surprise Fucceri if they were halfway to Milan by now. He found a phone that his men had mercifully left intact and put a call in to his
capo
to report their failure.

LANARK COUNTY, February 1985

The tire blew on Lance Maxwell’s pickup about a half mile past the Darling/Lavant township line. The truck skidded in the slush as Lance brought it to a halt on the side of the dirt road. He got out to check the damage, cursing under his breath.

“Stay, Dooker,” he told the big German shepherd on the passenger’s seat.

He hunkered down for a look, then stood, hitching up his pants. Christ on a cross! You’d think the sucker’d hold out for just a couple more miles till he got home.

“Okay, Dooker,” he called to the dog. “Come on down, boy.” The German shepherd jumped down from the cab of the pickup and pushed his nose into Lance’s hand. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Go catch yourself a squirrel or something. I got work to do.”

He fetched the spare from the back of the pickup, leaned it up against the side panel, then dug out his jack and tire iron from under a mess of cords, tools and canvas. Glancing to see where the dog had got to, he spied Dooker sniffing along the side of the road, back toward the turnoff that led up to French Line. The blowout had stranded him in front of the old Treasure place. Frank Clayton’s weather-beaten “For Sale” sign was still out on the snow-covered lawn. Sure, Frank, he thought. The day somebody buys this crap-hole from you’s the day I stand you for a case of two-four.

Dooker returned to see what he was doing as he got the jack under the back of the truck and started to hoist the vehicle up. “Get outta the way,” he told the dog when it got too close.

He hadn’t been the one to find old man Treasure—that joy’d been reserved for Fred Gamble, who’d driven up to collect on a grocery bill but had trooped right into the place along with everybody else after the cops had hauled the body away. You never saw such a thing. Buddy Treasure mustn’t have thrown out a newspaper since before the war.

They were piled ceiling-high along the walls of every room and hallway. Thousands of the suckers, all yellowed and stinking the way newspaper does when it gets wet. There were magazines too. Old copies of the
Star Weekly
—he hadn’t seen them for some time.
Life. Macleans. Time
magazines going back to when most of the cover was just a red border. All kinds. But that wasn’t the worst.

It seemed that in the last year Buddy’d decided to stop throwing out his garbage or using the upstairs can when he had to go for a crap. The kitchen had more refuse in it than the town dump. There was mold and shit you didn’t even want to think about growing over everything. And talking about shit, Buddy’d taken to dropping a load in the corner of the living room and wiping his ass with a piece of old yellowed newspaper.

Weird fucker, no doubt about that. No wonder the missus took up the kids and beelined out of there without a word to nobody.

That was nine, ten years ago now, Lance thought as he removed the blown tire. Longer since the missus took off. Willie Fuller had bought the place from the bank and tried to fix it up, but he just couldn’t get the stink out of it. He sold it to some out-of-towner who had started to take down the walls, really getting ready to give the place a good going over. But he quit halfway through the job and the place’d been up for grabs ever since, listed with Frank’s agency. And the day Frank sold the sucker…

“Shit,” he muttered as he studied his spare. The tread was worn as smooth as a baby’s ass. Well, it’d get him home. He finished up in a hurry, tossed the old rim with the flaps of tire hanging from it into the back of the truck. The jack and tire iron followed it with a clatter.

“Dook!” he called, looking around for the big shepherd. “Hey Dooker! Get your ass back here—double-time.”

He spotted the dog over in the field behind the Treasure place. Dooker had his head lifted high like he was listening to something, his broad head tilted to one side as he studied the woods beyond. Lance started to call out again, but then he heard it, too. A quiet sort of piping sound, low and breathy. It made him feel a little strange—hot, like the way you get when the weather warms up and springtime grabs you by the balls, telling you it’s time to make babies.

He took a couple of steps in the direction that the sound was coming from and started to get all sweaty. He was getting hard, his penis pushing up against his jeans. Lanark County, like most of Ontario, was in the middle of one of those February thaws that come up for a few days, then buggers off with a laugh, but that was no reason for him to be feeling the way he was. His penis was so hard it hurt. His chest was all tight and it was hard to breathe. His ears buzzed with the piping sound that came drifting across the fields—not loud, but it pierced him all the same.

He thought maybe he was going to come right there, right in his pants on the side of the road, but then as suddenly as he’d become aware of the sound, it left him. He staggered to lean weakly against the side of the pickup.

Christ, he thought. That’s it. My first honest-to-Jesus heart attack.

He was still weak. It took all of his energy to lift his head and look across the field. He could see Dooker, still listening, still watching the woods though there was nothing there that Lance could see. Then suddenly the big shepherd shook himself, looked around and came bounding back across the snow toward the truck. By the time Dooker was pushing his nose up against Lance’s hand, Lance was breathing easier again.

Gotta see the doc, he told himself. No more farting around. He says diet, I’m dieting this time. Jesus.

He called Dooker into the cab, slowly settled in the driver’s seat and started the engine up. Giving the fields behind the Treasure place a final considering look, he put the truck into gear and pulled away.

TORONTO, March 1985

The music was contemporary Europop, but the dancer’s moves were pure bump-and-grind. The MC had announced her as Tandy Hots: “And Tandy’s always randy, boys—you know what I mean?” Sitting at his table, nursing a beer, Howie Peale figured he knew just what the MC meant.

She couldn’t be more than seventeen tops, and that body. Oh, she had the moves down all right. Teasing little moves that made him want to shout along with some of the other guys in the joint, but he held back because he didn’t want to look like an asshole to his new friend. Earl Shaw wasn’t even watching the show. He was just sitting there, his bull-neck hunched over the table as he leafed through a day-old
Toronto Star
. He was drinking whiskey—straight, with a beer chaser.

Howie’d met Earl in the can—they were both in the Don Jail on drunk and disorderly charges at the time. Right off, Howie knew Earl was his man. Howie wasn’t too big and he wasn’t too smart. He had survived the street scene by latching on to someone who was both. He’d run errands, do a little of whatever, just to keep on the good side of whoever was his main man at the time. Right now that man was Earl.

Earl was the kind of guy you could really respect. Smart and tough and he didn’t take shit from nobody. Even the screws in the can had been a little leery of him. First night they were out, he and Earl hit a gas bar and made off with a clean $243 plus change just by sticking a gun in some pimply-faced kid’s nose. Earl’d even split fifty-fifty. No way he was letting go of this gig, Howie thought.

Tandy Hots was down to her G-string and pasties now, moving slowly across the stage until she was right in front of their table.

“They really get off on being up there, huh, Earl?” Howie said. He licked his lips, looking up into the dancer’s crotch.

Earl grunted and glanced at her. “Who gives a fuck what they like,” he said. “Just so’s they do what they’re told.”

Howie nodded. The dancer moved farther down the stage and he tried to imagine a woman like that being his, doing just what
he
told her to. If they were in a hotel or someplace, just the two of them, instead of this strip joint on Yonge Street… His dreamy mood left him as he sensed Earl stiffen across the table.

“Look at this,” Earl said.

He turned the paper around so that Howie could see. There was a photograph of a good-looking woman accepting a check from a Wintario official. She wasn’t built like Tandy Hots, Howie thought, but she wasn’t bad at all.

He read the caption. Her name was Frances Treasure and she’d just won two hundred grand in the lottery. He shook his head slowly. Jesus. Two hundred grand! And all she was planning to do with it was buy back the place where she’d grown up and fix it up.

“I tell you, Howie,” Earl said, “somebody’s looking after me.”

“What do you mean?”

Earl put his finger down on the photograph. “See this broad?”

“Yeah. Lucky bitch.”

“She’s my ex,” Earl said.

Howie looked at the photo again. “No shit?”

“No shit,” Earl said. He looked Howie in the eye. “And you know what I think, Howie, m’man?”

Howie shook his head.

“I figure she owes me,” Earl said. “Course, first we got to find her. That could take a little time. But then…” He grinned, a slow and wicked grin that gave him a crazy look. Howie grinned back. Sonovabitch had a weird streak in him a mile wide, no doubt about it, but there was no way Howie was letting go of this gig. Not when the good times were just starting to roll.

“What’re we gonna do then?” Howie asked.

Earl’s grin grew wider. “Then we’re gonna party.”

The Riddles of Evening

Pan pipes a tune but once

And all the forests dance.

—Joshua Stanhold,

from “Goatboy”

And suddenly they knew

that the mystery of the hills, and

the deep enchantment of evening,

had found a voice

and would speak with them.

—Lord Dunsany,

from
The Blessing of Pan

1

Frankie followed the moving van down the short driveway and watched it head off down the road; then she turned to look at the house. The difference between the half-gutted structure that had stood there when she bought the place and what was there now was phenomenal. In the bright sunlight of a perfect day in late May, the site of all her childhood nightmares had been transformed into the house of her dreams. A little smaller, perhaps, but cozy enough for her and Ali.

There was still a lot of work to be done. The workmen had left their typical battlefield of litter and debris behind them, but Frankie was looking forward to doing some work around the place with her own two hands. If anyone had told her that she’d be here now, even a day before the Wintario draw…

She found herself grinning foolishly. It was still hard to believe that she’d won. $200,000. Even after the $26,000 she’d paid for what was left of the house and its land, and the $60,000 or so she’d had to put out for renovations, she still had over $100,000 in the bank. Any day she expected someone to come up to her and tell her it was all a mistake, that she had to give it all back, but it wasn’t going to happen. She wouldn’t allow it to happen. Not now.

She made her way slowly back to the house. Opening the front door, she almost ran into her daughter, who was carrying a stack of empty boxes down the stairs.

“Watch where you’re going, kiddo,” she said.

Ali poked her head around the boxes. “Are the movers gone?”

“Yup. We’re on our own now, out in the backwoods of Lanark County where few men dare to go.”

“Oh, Mom!”

Frankie laughed and took the boxes from her. Ali had her curly blond hair but wore it short instead of in a long spill down her back as Frankie did. She also had Frankie’s strong Teutonic features—the broad nose and brow, the wide mouth—and eyes such a dark blue that the pupils sometimes got lost in them. They were often mistaken for sisters, which delighted Frankie, who was thirty-four, at the same time as it embarrassed her fourteen-year-old daughter.

“Are you finished with your room?” Frankie asked.

“For now. I thought I’d give you a hand in the kitchen and then maybe we could explore a bit.”

Frankie tossed the boxes into the big screened-in porch that led off from the kitchen’s back door. “Tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you let me finish up in here and you go ahead exploring. Then when I’m done, we can have a bite to eat and you can show me all the hot spots.

“You sure you don’t mind?” Ali asked, obviously torn between wanting to get out into the sun and feeling it unfair to leave her mother working alone.