Dead Anyway (22 page)

T
HE
C
APITAL
City Gym was in a rehabilitated industrial building just north of the divide between Hartford’s downtown office cluster and the edge of the busy, though impoverished North End. It was in a sort of no-man’s land of bombed out commercial relics and hopeful revitalization.

The club was expensive to join and had the feel of an old-time athletic club, meaning it was mostly men, mostly middle-aged and mostly wide around the middle. I had bought a two-week trial membership with cash, and visited often enough to be fairly certain the sauna would be vacant from about nine o’clock on.

I left my watch in the locker room, so I didn’t know exactly what time it was, but it felt as though I’d been sitting there well past ten o’clock. I was about to abort when a very large man accompanied by two slightly less enormous men—one carrying a gym bag of his own—entered the sauna. All were in towels, exposing massive torsos festooned with ugly scars and tattoos. The sauna suddenly felt a lot smaller. They sat down across from me, and the biggest of the three, Little Boy, said in a pronounced accent, “Sorry, I brought company. I get lonely when I’m by myself.”

Little Boy had a head about the size of a medicine ball, exaggerated by a rebellious wad of curly brown hair. His cheekbones protruded like fleshy hemispheres, and his eyes, in deep wells, were a glassy, pale green. He maintained a vague, somewhat unhinged smile throughout, which I eventually realized was the natural set of his face.

“What kind of deal can I make with someone who doesn’t follow simple directions?” I asked.

“I got another friend standing guard at the door. So nobody bother us. Nobody hear us beating the shit out of you and taking that thing out of your dead hands.”

“So you’d settle for a single bar when you could have a truckload? I thought Little Boy was smarter than that,” I said, presenting the same hypothesis I’d floated by Natsumi.

“I don’t like people driving by my house. I don’t like them claiming to know my face. I especially don’t like people dictating terms,” he said. “That’s my job.”

“Not terms. Just precautions,” I said. “You would do the same if you had the keys to a gold mine. Quite literally. I know you’re a smart man, Boyanov. I wouldn’t be talking to you if you weren’t. So please don’t fuck this up by getting all aggressive with a guy who could make you richer than you could ever imagine.”

Little Boy seemed somewhat persuaded by that, though it only showed in his eyes.

“I got a pretty good imagination. But I’m listening.”

“Did you bring the test gear?”

Little Boy nudged the guy with the gym bag, who pulled out a cordless drill, a rubbing stone and a rack of little bottles of acid, calibrated to assess common degrees of gold purity, from ten karat up to twenty-four. He handed all this to Little Boy who put it on the bench. I was happy to see this array, since it both determined the karat and proved the purity held straight through the bar. You could achieve the same end by doing a specific gravity test with a tub of water and a good scale, but I figured rightly that drills and bottles of acid were more Little Boy’s style.

I took out the gold bar and set it down next to the gear. He secured the heavy bar easily with one mammoth hand and used the other to drill straight through, extracting a slender core. Then he took the stone and rubbed the core across the stone’s rough surface. The final stage was dropping two large drops of acid from the acid bottle.

We all stared at the wet blobs, which were still wet five minutes later, indicating that the gold in the center of the bar possessed the highest possible purity—twenty-four karat. Little Boy looked up at me.

“How much of this can you get?” he asked.

“Volume isn’t the problem. It’s time. The scam has a shelf life. You want in, you gotta say yes, like now. I don’t know why you wouldn’t. I take all the risk, you just take possession, realizing an automatic seventy-five percent profit by simply selling on the open market.”

The two guys sitting to either side of him stared at me like a pair of catatonic pit bulls. It would be hard to hide weapons under their towels, but I was sure they’d found a way. They never joined the conversation, and you could tell they didn’t care what we talked about. Their job was to watch me and keep Little Boy safe.

“Payments and transfers could be difficult,” said Little Boy, hitting on an element of the concept in least supply. Trust.

“I have zero incentive to cheat you,” I said. “My profit margin is only twenty-five percent. That’s good enough for me. You could try to cheat me. You could steal from me. You could kill me. But then, that’s the end of the project. Because only I can bring you the goods. It’s my angle, and it dies with me.”

Little Boy tried to project skepticism, but his eyes betrayed a different intent.

“Okay. We give it a try,” he said. “What happens next?”

“Before we get to that,” I said, “There’s one other thing.”

Little Boy looked up from the gold he had sliced off the bar. His eyes were the iciest I’d ever seen. At the same time animated and inert.

“What is that?” he asked.

“I have other types of product. More unusual stuff like iridium, palladium and rhodium. Much harder to move than regular gold, which I also have in more common purities, like eighteen and ten karat. For this I need a different kind of organization, no offense to you. I need Austin Ott. You can introduce me. It’s no skin off your back. You get all the pure gold you can handle.”

Little Boy looked suddenly less energetic, less like a little boy than a cautious, middle-aged man.

“Ott is made-up,” said Little Boy. “There is no such guy.”

“Bullshit, I say respectfully. Like I told you, there’s a window on this operation. We move fast enough, everybody wins. Word to Ott is part of the deal. No word, no deal. Kill me if you want, my people will just move on to the next potential partner, with you cut out forever.”

Little Boy sat back and put his arms around himself, as if imitating a hug.

“Okay, we tell a guy, who tells a guy and maybe the next guy can get word up the food chain. I’ll do my part. But no guarantees.”

“Why all this fear of Ott?” I asked. “Everyone else in the world is afraid of you. I’m afraid of you.”

Little Boy frowned. Few know how to process an insult, even if it’s indirect, when it’s packaged with a compliment.

“It’s not fear. We just don’t know if the guy really exists.”

“Maybe it’s not a guy. Maybe it’s a bunch of guys. Maybe it’s a woman. Who cares? There’s somebody with a very sophisticated operation out there calling himself Austin Ott. People are dead because of him. This I know.”

I hadn’t meant for my real life experience to comingle with the character I was playing, but it was probably for the best. The sincerity apparently cut through.

Little Boy rolled his head around in the way strong men do to stretch their overdeveloped neck muscles. His companions leaned out of the way.

“Okay, Mr. G.,” he said, breaching a layer of reserve by using my name. “We can send a message and ask for a reply. But we can’t make the reply happen. I write you a letter, you don’t write me back. What do I do? I go to your house and point a gun at your face and say, ‘Write back, you son of a bitch.’ But I don’t know where this man, if he’s a man, lives. So this is not an option.”

I nodded, joining in the new level of congeniality.

“Fair enough. Let’s split the difference. We do a deal. Say, worth a hundred thousand to you in expenses, four hundred in revenue. You put out the message, but the deal goes through no matter what. Then we see if this phantom Ott steps up. I’m thinking he will when he sees the numbers, backed by your good name. And by the way, when you secure Ott, you’re in line for a commission on every deal that happens after that. I’m talking deals worth hundreds of millions apiece. Maybe you should see at least five percent per. And that’s on top of our separate arrangement. Pure gravy.”

It was pretty obvious that Little Boy was starting to enjoy the hook in his mouth, even though he tried hard not to let it show. I sat back and waited for his response.

He held up the test sliver.

“I don’t worry about this one being okay. I worry about all the rest,” said Little Boy.

“Bring a metallurgist and all the testing gear you want to the exchange,” I said. “I won’t let something as stupid as product quality mess things up.”

“What gets messed up is your face,” said Little Boy. “Then we move on from there.”

I tried to look disappointed.

“Successful relationships do not involve all these threats,” I said. “I have ways to do you terrible harm. But why constantly point that out? Better to just be civil and get on with business.”

Little Boy looked at me as if I’d recited some poetry in ancient Greek. Yet somehow the sense of my proposition leaked through.

“Alright. Fair dues. How do we communicate? Transplant some more shrubbery?”

His buddies thought this was funny, as did I. We all laughed. I gave him a disposable phone, the best friend of the felonious.

“Call me on this. My number’s already programmed in. Tell me what you’re willing to invest, and I’ll bring the appropriate product to the meet. You bring cash and a way to confirm product quantity and quality. This is not complicated. Metal is metal. Your kids could test for karats. The price is set by international markets. You pay a quarter of the number we look up on the Internet. We all go away happy.”

He agreed, though still exhibiting a stubborn suspicion. I was pleased with Little Boy, whom I’d figured for a common breed of thug. A certain evil craftiness was apparent, but also subtlety of thought. Yet he could be led, and snagged by simple suggestion.

After they left, I sat in the sauna until closing time, then showered and got dressed, and left the gym by a back door which led to an alley, which led to the remote parking lot where I’d left the Outback. The night was pitch black, with no humans or vehicles in sight. If Little Boy’s people were following me, they were the best stalkers in history.

I drove out of the parking lot and went home. Natsumi looked relieved when I walked through the door.

“Oh, good. You’re not dead,” she said.

“Not yet, though the possibility was raised. Ekrem Boyanov is a very big person.”

“Did he agree to the deal?”

“I don’t think he was completely sold, but close. But it’s a good start.”

“I made dinner,” she said.

“You did?”

It was such a strange moment for me. To have a person living with me make a meal, and then wait for me to eat, was an entirely alien concept. Even when I lived with Florencia, I cooked all the meals, the default position of the partner who worked at home versus the one who worked late and usually arrived after a grinding ten-hour day.

“What, I shouldn’t have?” Natsumi asked.

“No, I’m just not used to it. Too long a feral man.”

“It’s not a banquet. Chicken pot pie and mixed greens. And wine, at least for me. You can drink tap water.”

While we ate I told her more about my meeting with Little Boy and his two muscle heads.

“How are you going to manage the exchange?” she asked.

“I’m still working on that. Any ideas?”

She thought about it.

“Make the switch in the parking lot of the Balkan Bakery. You told me Little Boy never commits crime in his own neighborhood. By the same token, no one will interfere with his transactions, or even acknowledge anything’s going on. It’s also an assurance to him. You’d be beyond crazy to pull any crap right in the heart of Bosniak central.

“Isn’t this committing a crime?”

She shrugged.

“It’s a business deal. Try it out on him. See what he thinks.”

I had the chance to do that the next day when Little Boy called me on the cell I’d given him. He told me he was willing to invest $100,000 in the first go ’round. To test the concept and to work out the downstream market. I proposed Natsumi’s approach for the exchange, with an honest description of the rationale. He surprised me by buying the whole argument.

“For sure, we’re not going to kill you in our own backyard,” he said. “So maybe we can later have a little more trust, eh?”

We made arrangements for me to meet him at eleven
P
.
M
., an hour after the Balkan Bakery closed. He’d bring the $100K in cash, a scale and testing gear. I’d bring the gold.

When I got home, I was able to tell Natsumi that she had a future in criminal transaction logistics. She looked proud of herself.

“When you add that to professional blackjack dealer, I sound quite sinister.”

We didn’t talk much more about the plan since there wasn’t much to say. I was going through with it, and we’d done all we could think of to keep me safe, so there was little point in belaboring the obvious concerns. Instead, Natsumi went back to her paper, which had grown from ten pages to nearly fifty, prompting her to ask if she was reinforcing stereotypes of the Asian overachiever.

“Thirty-eight years old, and you’re finally graduating from college?”

“Point taken.”

F
OR MYSELF
, I went back to my favorite evening pastime, reviewing Florencia’s financials. That night, I remembered the lease on the property in Scottsdale she’d arranged through
spacejockeys.com
. I went in other private files and saw the address was 358 Jacaranda Boulevard, Suite 35. I pulled up a Google map and pegged the spot as deep within a heavily commercialized area of the city. Google asked if I wanted a street view, and I thought, sure, why not.

It was a fairly new brick building in a complex that included a Marriot Hotel and Morton’s Steakhouse. Florencia’s space was on the top floor at the end of a long hall. I googled the building’s address, and got the leasing agent—a commercial real estate firm—and three other businesses connected with the location: an advertising agency, geological surveyors and a brokerage house. None were at Suite 35.

I wrote the real estate agency and asked who was leasing Suite 35. I was surprised by the nearly instantaneous response, apologizing that such information was confidential, but there were still many highly desirable vacancies in the building which she’d be eager to show me. Would tomorrow at ten be convenient?