Big Trouble (12 page)

“MAN,” said Eddie, watching Eliot and Anna walk away. “I can't believe the way some people treat veterans, after what we done for this country.”

“We didn't do shit,” Snake pointed out. “We ain't veterans.”

“
They
don't know that,” said Eddie. “And I bet I
would
of been a vet, if I was old enough.”

“I think you have to graduate from at least, like, eighth grade,” said Snake.

“Well, that ain't the point,” said Eddie. “Point is, these people are some ungrateful fucks.” He spat a wad of brownish glop on the sidewalk. “We ain't made but three dollars today.”

“Speaking of which,” said Snake. “Somethin' I wanna do.”

Eddie waited.

“You know that little punk at the Jackal?” Snake said. “Who did my ankle?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard he works there now, sometimes.”

“So?”

“So I wanna pay him a visit.”

“I dunno, man. I don't wanna fuck with that bartender again. Him and his baseball bat.”

“His bat don't mean shit if we got a gun.”

“We ain't got a gun.”

“I know a guy can get us one.”

Eddie thought about it. “I dunno,” he said. “Why don't we just jump the punk outside?”

“Because the cash register is inside.”

Eddie looked at Snake.

“So this ain't really about the punk,” he said.

“Oh, it's about the punk,” said Snake. “And the bartender. And the cash register. Three birds with one stone.”

Eddie thought about it.

“I don't know nothin' about no guns,” he said.

“Time you learned,” said Snake. “Bein' a veteran and all.”

W
hen the guy walked into the Jolly Jackal, Puggy was sitting at the bar, watching a rebroadcast of
The Jerry Springer Show
. The topic was husbands who wanted their wives to shave the fuzz off their upper lips. The position of the wives was that fuzz is natural; the position of the husbands was, OK, maybe it's
natural,
but it's also
ugly
. The wives were now arguing that if the husbands wanted to see
ugly
, they might look at their own selves in the mirror, because they were not exactly a threat to Brad Pitt. Nobody on either side of this debate weighed under 250 pounds. So far, there had not been any punching, but Puggy could tell, from the way Jerry Springer was edging away from the stage into the audience, that there soon would be.

The guy who walked into the Jolly Jackal was carrying a briefcase, so Puggy figured he was going to go to the back to talk to the bearded guy, John. That's what the guys with briefcases usually did.

Puggy was not the sharpest quill on the porcupine, but he had figured out that the Jolly Jackal was not a regular bar. There were few drinking patrons: The best customer, as measured in total beers consumed, was, by a large margin, Puggy, who did not pay. The real action at the Jolly Jackal, Puggy noted, took place in the back, at the table where John sat. A couple of times a day, a guy, or maybe several guys, would come in to talk to John. Every few days, Leo the bartender would call Puggy back to the locked room with the crates, and they'd grunt and shove and heave a crate or two into, or out of, the Mercedes, or some van, or sometimes a U-Haul.

Puggy still didn't know what was in the crates. If he had to guess, he'd say it was drugs, although it seemed kind of heavy to be drugs. But basically his position was, as long as they let him watch TV and drink beer, it didn't concern him what was in the crates, or who John and Leo were.

In point of fact, John and Leo—whose real names were Ivan Chukov and Leonid Yudanski—were Russians. They had met in 1986, when they'd both served as maintenance technicians in a Soviet army division whose mission was to protect and defend—which meant occupy and, if necessary, stomp on—the Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan.

This was not a plum assignment. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan was a remote, harsh, mountainous, extremely tribal nation whose economy was based primarily on revenge. The Grzkjistanis spent their adult lives thinking up and carrying out elaborate plots to kill and main each other in connection with bitter, centuries-old grudges, many of them involving goats.

The only group that the Grzkjistanis hated more than each other was outsiders, which meant that the Russian soldiers were as popular as ringworm. Fraternization between the two cultures was officially banned, but every now and then a soldier would try to hook up with one of the Grzkjistani women. This required a breathtaking level of horniness, because after centuries of inbreeding, the average Grzkjistani was, in terms of physical attractiveness, on a par with the average Grzkjistani goat.

Nevertheless, such liaisons did occasionally take place, and when they were discovered, as they inevitably were, the army had learned that it was wise to get the soldier involved out of the country immediately, because otherwise, sooner or later, he would be found tied naked to a rock with his genitals nowhere near the rest of his body.

And thus most of the soldiers assigned to protect the Republic of Grzkjistan wisely elected to perform their mission by staying in their barracks and getting as drunk as humanly possible. Ivan and Leonid were in an excellent position to facilitate this mission, because, as maintenance technicians, they had access to large metal drums full of solvents and fluids that could, taken internally, put a real buzz in a person's brain. Unfortunately, some of these chemicals could also permanently shut down a person's central nervous system; the trick was to know exactly what was safe to consume, and in what quantities. Ivan and Leonid had developed considerable expertise in this branch of maintenance, and pretty soon they built up a nice little franchise, supplying recreational beverages to their comrades in exchange for money, cigarettes,
Debbie Does Dallas
videos, et cetera. Ivan was the brains, good at organizing and negotiating; Leonid was the muscle, good at keeping customers in line, if necessary by fracturing their skulls. As their business grew, word got around that if you needed something—and not just something to drink—Ivan and Leonid were the guys to see.

One day in 1989, a man came all the way from Moscow to visit Ivan and Leonid. He wore nice clothes that actually fit, and he identified himself as a businessman, which Ivan and Leonid correctly understood to mean that he was a criminal. The man had an attractive proposition: He was willing to give Ivan and Leonid cash American dollars, and all he wanted in return was some machine guns that—while not technically the property of Ivan and Leonid—were basically just sitting around.

And thus Ivan and Leonid moved up the career ladder from bootleggers to arms merchants. The timing was perfect: The Soviet Union was imploding, and Moscow was having trouble feeding, let alone paying, its far-flung troops. At remote outposts such as Grzkjistan, discipline and morale—not to mention inventory controls—were virtually nonexistent. Ivan and Leonid found that if you were paying American dollars, you could have just about any piece of military hardware you wanted. You need machine guns? Right over here! A tank? Pick one out, comrade!

Ivan and Leonid had a knack for procuring and selling army property, and their new business grew rapidly. When their terms of enlistment expired, they left the army, but they maintained their network of contacts throughout the vast and increasingly chaotic Soviet military complex. They expanded their customer base, sometimes traveling abroad; soon they were dealing with foreign governments, terrorists, revolutionaries, paramilitary organizations, religious leaders, and random wackos in places all over the world, such as Idaho.

In the marketplace of international arms sales, Ivan and Leonid developed a reputation for flexibility and customer service. Unlike their larger competitors in the arms trade, particularly the American government, Ivan and Leonid didn't put you through a lot of red tape, and they would go the extra mile to locate that hard-to-find item. For example, when a Jamaican Marxist group called the People's United Front was looking to trade a large quantity of high-grade marijuana for an attack submarine, Ivan was able to broker a complex deal involving—in addition to the Soviet navy—the government of Paraguay, a Chicago street gang named the Cruds, and the Church of Scientology. The deal culminated, six months later, in the delivery of a semi-reconditioned World War II-era Russian sub, the
Vrmsk
, which the People's United Front renamed the
Mighty Sea Lion
. As it turned out, the People's United Front had considerably more zeal than nautical expertise, and the
Mighty Sea Lion
, while attempting a dive on its first revolutionary mission—an attack outside Kingston Harbor on the new Disney-built luxury cruise ship
Goofy
—sank like an anvil. But this did not reflect badly on Ivan and Leonid. They were in sales, not training.

By the late 1990s, with the Russian economy melting down, Ivan and Leonid decided to move their operation abroad, and they settled on South Florida. They had visited the area when they had worked on the submarine deal, and they liked the warm weather. They also liked the seaport and airport, which were very hospitable to the international businessperson; if you dealt with the right people, you could bring in almost anything, including probably live human slaves, without having to answer a bunch of pesky questions from Customs. Guns were easy. Ivan and Leonid always got a kick out of going through the airport security checkpoint, seeing surly personnel in bad-fitting blazers grimly scrutinizing the Toshiba laptops of certified public accountants, while, in the cargo tunnels a few feet below, crates containing weapons that could bring down a building were whizzing past like shit through a goose.

So Ivan and Leonid, now calling themselves John and Leo, became the proprietors of the Jolly Jackal. They found it amusing to be, once again, in the field of recreational beverages. And the bar was good cover for their real business: Random people could come and go at all hours, and nobody official cared what was going on, as long as John and Leo paid off the various municipal inspectors. The only downside to owning a bar, they found, was that people sometimes came in and actually wanted to buy drinks. But Leo was able to keep that to a minimum via a combination of poor service and occasionally hitting patrons with his bat.

Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your “collectors” and your “enthusiasts,” who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit.

But their best local customer, by far, was a local outfit that was always in the market for serious, big-ticket weapons, the kind of weapons real armies fight real wars with. John and Leo had no idea why anybody in Miami would need so much firepower, nor did they care. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was that when they got hold of a serious weapon, this outfit would usually buy it, no haggling, for cash.

The man who delivered the cash was the man who walked into the Jolly Jackal with the briefcase while Puggy was watching the couples argue about lip fuzz on
Jerry Springer
. Leo, standing at the cash register, nodded as the man walked past. John rose from his table and quietly greeted the customer by name.

“Hello, Mr. Herk,” he said.

It was, indeed, Arthur Herk, spouse abuser, embezzler, and legal owner of Puggy's tree. Arthur's employer, Penultimate, Inc., builder of faulty buildings, was John and Leo's big local customer. The reason Penultimate was buying weapons—in fact the whole reason Penultimate existed in the first place—was that it was planning to take over Cuba once Fidel was dead. Quite a few organizations in South Florida, not to mention Cuba, were planning to do this. One thing you could say for sure about post-Castro Cuba: It would not lack for leadership.

Arthur was the bag man for Penultimate. That was pretty much his entire mid-level-executive job: delivering bribes and other illegal payments. He had done this job reasonably well until a few months before, when his gambling problem had begun to get out of hand. He'd come out of work one day and found two men waiting for him in the parking lot; they'd informed him that, unless he came up with a very specific amount of money within twenty-four hours, they would have no choice but to remove one of his fingers without benefit of anesthetic. They'd taken Arthur around to the back of their car, opened the trunk, and made him look inside. On the floor of the trunk was a pair of pruning shears. Arthur peed his pants.

So Arthur began skimming cash from the bribes, just enough to keep all his digits through the next week. He hoped, with the irrational hope of the true loser, that somehow the money would not be missed, or that its loss would be blamed on somebody else. But of course it was missed. Arthur's superiors said nothing to him; they didn't want to spook him into running to the police. They let him continue his bribe deliveries while they quietly brought Henry and Leonard down from New Jersey to take care of the situation. Their intention was that it would look like a gambling-related mob hit, nothing to do with Penultimate.