Black Tide (22 page)

"Guy next to me is Sal Grillo, my cousin. You sort of met him last week."

"I did what?" I asked, and when he handed over the next photo, I almost dropped it on the fine tablecloth. It showed Sal again, on the shores of a rocky beach, wearing a wet suit. I handed both photographs back to Felix, aware that my face was getting quite warm.

"How long have you known, Felix?" I demanded. "And how come you didn't tell me right away?"

He carefully replaced the photos in his wallet. "I just found out this morning. Another message on my answering machine, telling me to negotiate tonight in good faith. That Sal was a signal, one I should take very seriously. I made a follow-up phone call, to a contact I have with the medical examiner's office, seeing if that diver's corpse had a tattoo of a rose on its wrist. It did." "

“Jesus,” I murmured.

"I wasn't going to keep it a secret, but I didn't want to get you spooked." Felix turned to me, his lips compressed, his face dark. "I was wrong, right from the start. I should have clued you in. And I'm doubly glad you're here. Try to keep things calm, will you?"

A lot of things were racing through my head, including an urge to get the hell out of that restaurant, along with an urge to start yelling at Felix for keeping secrets from me, and then Tony came back. I swallowed hard and stared at him, trying to think of what creatures were living behind such calm eyes.

He sat down and Felix asked, ''Anyone else joining us?"

Tony picked up the menu, a long brown folder with Vault embossed in gold letters. "No. This is an easy deal, Felix. One I can handle on my own. I don't need someone holding my hand."

I picked up my own menu and said, "Well, Felix and I don't usually hold hands. At least not in public," and Felix smiled just a bit as he started leafing through the pages of his own menu, and I felt like I had gained a bit of a success.

When our waitress came by, Tony looked up and said, "Hon, we’re both late for something, so I think we'll only be ordering appetizers. Is that okay with you guys?"

With Felix's revelation about his dead cousin, I knew I didn't have the appetite for a full meal with Tony Russo sitting across from us. So I nodded and Felix said, "Sure," and when the waitress tried to hide her frown, Tony said, "Don't worry, we'll make up for it in the tip."

The waitress was in her early twenties and she smiled at Tony's comment. The funny thing about the Vault was that, for all of its Victorian splendor, the waiter and waitress uniform was blue jeans, white shirts and  bow ties, but right then nothing much seemed funny. The headless and handless diver. A relative of Felix's….

After she took our orders Tony folded his hands and said, “let's get down to business, Felix. The number you mentioned in your postcard is not of this universe, do you understand that? There is no way anybody is going to pay you that amount of money."

Felix buttered a roll and said, "That's the number, Tony. It's not negotiable. You're going to have to live with it."

"Bah," Tony said. "Listen, we want that address, and we want what's in that house. All right? It's ours. Now. You know were the house is, and we appreciate that. So give us the address as a gift, and we'll toss some business your way. We'll both end up with something and there's no hard feelings. But this demand for money, for such an amount, is way out of line. You don't have the weight anymore. You're nothing, Felix. You're a loner and we could take care of you without getting permission."

Felix put down his butter knife and smiled. "That just shows how stupid you are, Tony, and why you're here, on my turf, talking business to me. You're doing this, all for a loner?"

"You are a loner. You've got nothing behind you, no friends, no influence."

Felix eyed him as he bit into his roll. "You may be surprised at how many friends I still have down in Boston."

Tony waved a hand in his direction. "You mean the Old One? Forget it. All he cares about is eating and sleeping. He's no longer in the middle of things, Felix. He's retired. Just an old dog."

"Maybe so. But do you want to find that out?" Tony shook his head and reached into the basket of rolls, and I decided to try to keep things focused and said, "Why the interest?"

"Did you say something?" Tony asked, not looking at me as he unpeeled a pad of butter. I felt like kicking him under the table.

"Yeah, I said something. Why the interest? What's in the safe house isn't something that you can fence, or advertise that you own. It's stuff that's as hot as plutonium. So why the interest?"

Tony talked back to me, using his own knife as a pointer, "Because they're a symbol, a sign of respect. Something strong and out of the ordinary, something that can be given as a sign of honor, or held up as an example of what can be done under the right circumstances. Besides that, why we want that house or what's in it is none of your business or concern. Just the fact that we want it is enough."

"So Felix should just trust you, is that it?"

The waitress came back, carrying a tray and our orders. As she began to set down plates Tony talked back to me, even though he was looking intently at Felix. "Don't you worry about Felix. He knows the way we do business, our approach, our leans of getting attention."

By now a sly grin was on Tony's face, as he said, "Even with all of that, Felix, we were wondering when you were going to come around. You were quite difficult, not wanting to talk until we agreed to negotiations. Even when we sent that calling card to you last week, you demanded a sit-down. You know, we wanted it to wash up in your backyard, but we misjudged the tides and it landed up the next town over. For a family member and such, we wondered why you didn't get back to us sooner. Still, here we are, talking, so I guess that counts in your favor."

Even with Felix just telling me a few minutes ago, the words from Tony seemed to bore right into my chest. I wondered how Felix was doing. With my right hand, I reached under the table and patted him on the knee. An odd gesture, but it seemed to do something, and I sensed him unwind a bit. Tony started eating, still smiling

"I've talked before, in circumstances almost as trying, Tony," Felix said, his voice held calm, by fury, I guess. "Negotiations are ways important, no matter the circumstances. So. What was the word that got you here? How did you pick up on me?"

"You want me to give up my trade secrets, that's it?" Tony asked.

Felix took a spoonful of soup. "These are negotiations, right? That means give-and-take, Tony. Play the game, why don't you. My guess is that someone from the Corelli family was involved, and you got the word. A good guess?"

Tony smiled and dabbled at his lips with a white napkin. “Good try, Felix. You remember Frank Corelli, Jimmy's older brother? Well, he's in a nursing home now and I still visit him once a month. He's an old-timer, Felix, a real gentleman, even though he's losing his mind and he gets fed by tubes. One day I was there and we were talking old times, and he told me right out of the blue that his brother had ordered those paintings stolen. Can you believe it? Jimmy Corelli, who'd only look at a painting if it showed a woman with bare tits, he ordered the hit on a museum. But then something got screwed up, big time, and they ended up in Maine. At one of Jimmy's safe houses."

I was beginning to feel a bit better, and started unpeeling and eating my order of jumbo shrimp. "But Frank didn't know where the house was."

Tony shook his head. "Nope. I tried to get that out of him and he just smiled up at me, drool running down his chin, and he told me how he missed going to Mass every week. So I poked around and I learned about you, Felix. You've been there. You know where that house is."

Felix rattled his spoon in his empty soup dish. "That I do Tony. And it's going to cost you money."

Something seemed to crackle in the air of the restaurant, and Tony smiled back. "Oh, no, it's not, Felix. It's going to be a gift."

Before Felix could say anything I jumped in again and said, "Who's the buyer?"

Tony looked over at me. "What?"

“I said, who's the buyer? All that talk about signs of respect is so much nonsense, and you know it. What people respect is what you can do and what weight you carry. Those paintings don't do a thing for you or for your partners. The fact that you have three nineteenth-century pieces of art isn't going to impress Colombians or Jamaican posses. Not by a long shot. Besides, the cops and the FBI are still after them. So you're not doing this for symbols. You want money. So you have a buyer."

Tony opened his mouth as if to say something, stopped, cocked his head and then said, "Yeah, there's a buyer involved, And he's very interested in picking up something that was promised to him five years ago."

"The original buyer," I said.

Tony nodded. ''A man who carries a lot of weight, Felix, and who's very interested in that address."

"Maybe I can do better talking to him on my own," Felix said.

Tony's face flushed. ''An arrangement's been there's no changes allowed. You work with me."

Felix seemed to consider that for a moment, and said, ''All right. Maybe I knock my price down. Hell, maybe I even give them to you as a favor, for both you and your buyer. But I'd like to talk to him, see who he is and what's going on. I'm nervous about getting into consideration with someone I've never met."

Tony wiped his lips again with his napkin. "Is that possible, or are you just jerking me around?"

"You know what I've done in the past, Tony. Jerking around I not in my catalogue of moves."

He tapped his fingers on the tablecloth for a moment or two, then pulled out a wallet, withdrew a fifty-dollar bill and tossed it on the table. "Let's go, then. He's outside, waiting in my car."

I got up with Tony, and Felix said, "Concerned about being seen in public?"

Tony said, "Concerned, yeah, that's a good word. But let's say h wants progress, wants progress so bad that he didn't want to wait for a phone call when I got out of here. So that's why he's in my car."

Outside we walked down a cobblestone alley that led to a parking area behind the restaurant. The night air was warm and  the area was dark, with only a weak streetlight at one end. There was a wall of shrubbery and a six-foot wooden fence, with open spaces that led onto brick paths going into a small park. The lot was empty of people, with cars backed up to the wooden fence. Tony was in front of us, car keys jangling in one hand, and he said to Felix, "You see, he'll tell you that I'm the man you've got to make deals with. Now, once we… hey."

He stopped before a Grand Marquis with Massachusetts license plates. Even in the dim light I could tell that the interior was empty. Tony bent over and looked in the driver's side window and said in a puzzled tone, "He's gone."

I stood next to Felix, maybe a couple of feet away, when a walked out of the shadows near the shrubbery and the fence. I don’t think Tony saw him. Tony turned and was going to say something when the man came up to him and raised a hand, holding a silencer-equipped pistol, and shot him in the head.

Chapter Thirteen

A lot of things happened at once, like an acid-induced slide show. Tony grunted and fell back against his car, a spray of blood fanning out behind him on the car's windows, and then he sat down hard, his legs splayed out. I think I might have said something. I don't know. Felix said, "Christ," in a low voice, and above the night sounds of Porter and traffic going by and chamber music from the restaurant, there had been the sound of the gun firing --- like an ax handle striking a watermelon --- and a rattling clink, as the spent shell was ejected from the pistol and fell against the hood of an adjacent car.

The man turned, a wisp of smoke rising up from the silencer's opening, the pistol now trained on us. The stories about a person's whole life racing through one's mind at a time like this were proven false, for what it's worth, for all I thought was, what a waste. What a waste to end it here, in a conflict I knew almost thing about, with so much left undone, with so much to do after surviving that awful day in Nevada. I couldn't even look at the man’s face, which was hidden by a  ski mask. I just saw the shiny blackness of the silencer, looking over at me. It seemed as big as a bus.

The man's hand moved, and the pistol dropped down. He looked over at Felix. He said quietly, "We'll be in touch."

Then he left, walking through an opening in the dark fence and into the park. . Tony was sitting before us, back against the car, head slumped forward. I wanted to look away but I couldn't help staring at the man who just a few moments ago was threatening Felix, was looking at me with disdain, was thinking and breathing and doing everything with forty or so years of memories. Now, one pull of a trigger later, this man was turning gray and was slumping farther forward, and the spray of blood that had come from the back of his head now had little rivulets running down the glass of his car. 

"Move," came Felix's voice. "We've got to get out of here," and I did just that. I looked down at the asphalt of the parking lot and shut everything out and walked and strolled and breathed deeply until I was on a main street, in the damp air, hearing footsteps behind me and thinking it was Felix, and not really caring. All I wanted to do was move and put that restaurant and that dead man as far away from me as possible. The streetlights didn't seem to be working, for the night was quite dark.