Stuffed (8 page)

“Don’t look at me.” Pete held his palms up. “She said she’d only let you do it if she could come along to make sure we kept you safe.”

I’d been hearing nothing but the words
chop shop
all week. Most of these places are overseas, in certain Asian countries where they have tacit protection from the local government just as they would if they were processing drugs. Periodically, they attempt to establish one in the U.S., if for no other reason than they have less bribes to pay, fewer middlemen, better quality assurance, and more inventory control. The valuable parts range from pelts and organs to horns and claws. Big cats usually constitute a large proportion of these animals, everything from servals to Siberian tigers. Penises and testes of these cats are highly sought after, but so are assorted other organs such as brains, paws, claws, and various glands. All of them are used in traditional Asian medicine to treat everything from impotence to bad luck. You’d think Viagra and Match.com would have made this stuff like a lozenge for the flu. Go figure. The United States has a huge Asian customer base that will pay top dollar for what amount to cherry Sucrets.

But bears were more plentiful and in demand at the time, not only for their gallbladders but for their paws. There were rumors that a single serving of bear-paw soup in South Korea could go for $1,400. I wondered if that came with oyster crackers. And it was Pete and Fish and Wildlife’s belief that Smiler & Co. were primarily in the business of moving a lot of bear parts, far more than they could account for legally. The feds aimed to shut them down, and I was the chump who had to stick his neck out and take a look around.

Would taking down a single chop shop stymie the entire trade? Well, one less sure wouldn’t hurt. So did I want to help out? Yes. But I’d watched too many movies to think wearing a wire wasn’t without considerable risk. I was having flash-forwards of Smiler ripping the mike from my jacket, strapping me to a saw table, and flicking the switch. The buzzing blade heading for my midsection, I’d say: “So, Park, I guess you expect me to talk?” Him replying: “No, Mr. Carson, I expect you to die.” Next thing I’m soup with oyster crackers, probably at two bucks a bowl. Causes lapses in judgment.

Cowardice is more ally than enemy, and bravery is prodded at the sharp end of dilemma’s horns. The only reason I didn’t run screaming from the van was the snorting bull of pride standing behind me. To back out would wave a red flag in his face.

The plan was for me to meet Smiler & Co. at the corner of Peck Slip and Front Street, a pretty lonely spot at that hour of the morning. I had a duffel bag packed with $50,000 in small bills. I’d contacted Chuck. “Garf, you dog sucker!” Between his mutterings, I told him I could move some exotic pelts if Smiler could arrange such a thing. It didn’t take long for him to set up a meeting with Smiler, who said I should come prepared to buy as his inventory had a high turnover and he couldn’t hold anything for me. I wondered if they didn’t just intend to get me in a desolate spot and then deploy thugs to rip me off. Actually, I sort of hoped that they would, in which case I’d calmly hand over the money and walk.

Well, I did all the way up until Pete’s parting words. He smiled, patting me on the shoulder. “Relax. Here. It looks like a cell phone, but it’s a GPS tracker. Don’t lose it or we’ll lose you. But it’ll go smooth as silk, and we’ll be right with you all the way.” As he climbed into the van, he added as an afterthought: “And be careful with your money.”

“My money?”
There was something in the way he said it, the spark in his eye.

He tried not to smile as the van started to pull away. “We didn’t think you’d mind if we borrowed some.”

Son of a bitch.

It was a night in April, which is anything but springlike. The sky was overcast, it was chilly and it was misting, but I hadn’t bothered with a raincoat. I was nervous, and hot, and didn’t want to sweat excessively for fear of looking nervous. Besides, I remember a movie in which somebody wearing a wire starts to sweat, the electronics short-circuit, he starts to freak from being singed, is discovered, and . . . and I seem to remember it ended badly for this fellow. Or what about that movie where the guy with the wire goes to a Japanese restaurant with his underworld cronies and is asked to take his boots off? The boots with the tape recorders in them? Or the one in which there’s a guy with a wire posing as a driver at a mob funeral, where the squeal of feedback on his mike gives him away?

My reverie was such that I didn’t hear the town car roll silently up behind me.

Compadre was in back, and from the open door he motioned for me to join him. I tossed in the bag first, and paused. He could easily have zoomed off with the money—I still hoped he would—but instead looked impatient. Not the brightest penny in the gumball machine.

I clambered in, carefully, like I was crawling into a cave that might have a bear in it. No angry bruins—just Compadre. We drove around in circles for a while, and when we finally disembarked, I recognized our locale: the 125th Street meat district, all the way on the West Side in Harlem. It was an industrial area of meat-packing establishments, dicey-looking parking lots, and warehouses, tucked under an elevated section of Riverside Drive. At that hour, on a Sunday, the place was pretty much deserted. You could go there for a late-night stroll—if you were naive.

But it made sense for a chop shop to be tucked into the meat district. The Dumpsters full of the operation’s residue—bones and carcassess—would blend in among the Dumpsters of fragmented livestock. And at a meat wholesaler, they’d have plentiful and spacious refrigeration at their disposal for all those dead animals.

I was in my usual sport coat, running shoes, chinos, and white shirt. The sport coat I kept unbuttoned, hoping the 007 camera in my belt buckle would make sure Pete Durban knew where I was. In case the batteries on my “cell phone” failed or my particular satellite had a fender bender with a meteor. But it was dark. I thought about saying something about where we were, for the mike in my lapel, but thought that might tip my mitt.

No, Mr. Carson, I expect you to die.

I kept mum as Compadre led the way past drums of foul suet and bones for rendering. In my top-ten least favorite aromas, before vomit and after burning hair, is that of meat districts with their lard-infused sidewalks that make dandy rat licks. Bean curd and carrot juice at the Chipper Sprout briefly seemed a palpable alternative to the Neanderthal Platter at the Steak N’ Swill.

I was led upstairs into a den. I say a den because it wasn’t an apartment, and it wasn’t exactly an office, though there was a sprawling desk where some work—possibly accounting—was performed. But there was also a large sectional sofa, a wall of mirrors, one of those patent-leather bars from the seventies, and copious track lighting. It was supposed to be classy but looked worn and tacky like a strip club. Part den, part den of iniquity.

A sizable poker table was centered in one half of the room by a large array of grimy factory windows, the kind that open bottom out. Two shady-looking guys stood at the table, one in a yellow sweater, one in a vest. Ten rolled skins were stacked on the table before them. I looked around for Smiler. He wasn’t there.

Compadre swept his hand over the rolled skins like a caterer displaying his finest canapés. I snapped a bubble and wondered if I’d deafened the technician at the other end of my microphone. Hoped I had, him all snug in that police van, me here rocking on my heels, facing down the buzz saw.

I pulled the string on one skin after the other, unrolling them and draping them one by one over a spare chair. When I was done, there were six leopard skins of varying quality, a cheetah, two smallish, mediocre tigers, and a huge, drop-dead-gorgeous Siberian tiger. Just skins, no heads or paws. They’d been cut quite carefully, with good tools, cleaned and brushed, but were untanned and without any felt backing. As is, they were suitable for wall mounting, but could still be tanned for clothing. Although I don’t know where you could wear a Siberian tiger jacket without raising more than just eyebrows—such as hackles. And they were one hundred percent genuine. You can tell fakes quite easily, because cat fur has a distinctive stacked or layered pattern when you bend a pelt and flex it. But a good pelt is lush and plush, and these two tigers looked like ill-fed captives. Some of the leopards had scars from rough treatment in transport.

Were I unscrupulous, I could get between five to seven thou each for the better leopard skins, less for the cheetah and small so-so tigers, and God knows what for the Siberian tiger. Take that figure, chop off fifty percent for my profit margin, and you had about forty thousand, ten less than what I had in the attaché case.

What I should have done at that point was just follow my instructions, buy the skins, and be on my way—let the troops come crashing in after I left. But the smattering of rare skins, probably a mere crumb from the whole pie, made my gum go soft—there was more, and I wanted to see it. I was working at my profession now, authenticating and appraising. So the dealer inside me elbowed his way past the panicky guy wearing a wire. Okay, so my kneecaps were trembling and I was chomping my bubblegum like my jaw was stamping out license plates—other than that I fancied myself a paradigm of CCC: cool, calm, and collected. I wanted to get an eyeful of the good stuff, like the Siberian. This was just the way shrewd dealers like Smiler worked. Try to unload some crap at top dollar, hope to wow me with the Siberian, and in a package deal get a prime markup on the so-so stuff. It couldn’t hurt to ask, just to look, could it?

“This is interesting merchandise.” I gestured to the unrolled skins. “What else have you got? I mean, I can move some of it, but some of it is just plain shit. My clients pay top dollar and demand the good stuff. I bring cash and am hoping to give you all of it.
For quality merchandise.”

The sweater, the vest, and Compadre exchanged glances like there was an unexplained bad smell, then a few staccato words of Chinese followed. Compadre turned and stepped out of the room. To call his boss, no doubt. If nothing else, maybe Smiler would show up and insure that he didn’t slip through the net.

Sure enough, Compadre reappeared, his eyes tight with annoyance. He shook his head.

I looked at the skins, and when I turned back, the three of them were standing in a row, arms folded, the Pep Boys via Seoul. But I don’t think they wanted to rotate my tires. Rather, make up my mind. But I have a stubborn, single-minded, and determined streak that serves me well in the day-to-day of doing business. And this approximated the day-to-day, so it came naturally, if unfortunately.

“I wanna speak with your boss.” My voice broke slightly, and when I cleared my throat I almost spit out my gum. “If there’s more, I don’t see why I should only have this to choose from.”

Compadre dialed his cell phone, exchanging glances with Sweater and Vest again, like he’d been the one who cut the cheese.

That reminded me of my own “cell phone,” and I gave a pat to my jacket pocket to make sure it was still there.

Mistake.

Sweater and Vest had guns in their hands fast as cobras nab a rat. My hands went up very slowly, not so much as a surrender as a gesture of non-intent. My kneecaps froze. It had happened so suddenly that I had trouble getting my breath.

“Whoa, hey . . .” I croaked, stroking the air like I was petting a freaked-out kitty. Nice kitty.

Compadre was talking Chinese into the phone as he came over and reached into my pocket, snatching the phone and showing it to Sweater and Vest, who deflated. The guns went below the table. He tossed the “cell phone” on the table.

Moments later, footfalls scuffed on the stairs and Smiler entered the room, a frown on his beak like that of a baby magpie. A bodyguard was with him, a rotund man with a jowly, irritable face and tiny feet in delicate-looking loafers. Why is it a lot of fat men have tiny feet? They need big ones, yet they get the small ones. His looked like a ballerina’s.

“We have showed you merchandise. Do you want it or not?”

I couldn’t back down now but tried to soft-pedal as much as possible, so I babbled.

“Look, I just asked if these ten were the whole bunch. Y’know? If there’s more you’re not showing me, I just want to know why I can’t choose from the whole lot. Y’know? I mean, if you don’t want to, that’s . . .”

Smiler squinted at me, and I didn’t like it.

“I don’t know you.” He shook his head. “I don’t like you. That is why. You buy from this, later you see more. That’s how it works.”

I held my hands up, giving in. “Okay, okay. So . . .” I gestured to the table. “How about I take the Siberian, these two leopards, and, um, this tiger . . .”

“Seventy.”

“Whoa, these aren’t for me, this is resale. Y’know? I mean, I’ve gotta have my profit margin.” The kneecaps were pumping like pistons.

He stepped up to my duffel bag, put it on the table, and snapped his fingers at Ballet Boy.

The bodyguard wrenched open my duffel bag. After rifling through the stacks of bills, he turned from the untidy jumble and grumbled something to Smiler.

“You have fifty. I give you all ten. Final offer. Get more money, come back for more. That’s it.”

That was an outright affront to my alter ego, and I had to forcibly shove the dealer inside me into the backseat. My kneecaps were revving. I took the steering wheel and said, “Okay, but promise me you’ll let me at some of the really good stuff next time.” I’d already pushed my luck. High time to pop the clutch, smoke my slicks, and make tracks.

His answer was a smirk, which displeased dealer Garth a great deal. He was making a chump out of me and he was enjoying it.

But he took to studying me a moment, and I wondered what he could possibly want now. In a more conciliatory tone, he ventured: “You see much merchandise, yes?”

I shrugged an acknowledgment.

With a grunt of satisfaction, he reached into his inside jacket pocket and handed me a well-worn sheet of paper. It was folded, and when I opened it I found a one-sided photocopy of what appeared to be a page from an old manuscript. The characters had little circles that I recognized from the signs throughout the Korean district in the East 30s.