The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella (20 page)

“Terry’s with Hollinger and Dunne, and they’re costing him a fortune. I told him to go see you at the start of all this, but he wanted to go with the union lawyer. I couldn’t talk him out of it. They’ve taken sixty grand already, and he’s only seen one doctor. Could you take a look at his case file?”

At that moment I would have given Terry a kiss and a seven-course meal at the Ritz if it got me away from security, never mind a free ride on a repetitive strain injury case.

“Tell him I’ll represent him for free,” I said.

Barry smiled. “I’ll tell him, all right. I’ll call him right now. He’s up on twelve.”

“Look, I really gotta split, Barry.”

“No problem. And thanks. I’m gonna tell him right now. He won’t friggin’ believe it.”

I got out from under Barry’s spell quicker than I’d hoped, and he sprang back to his seat behind the scanner.

I was
in
.

Turning, I put my back to the cool marble and felt the bomb clinging to my spine as I took in the line of people pouring through the entrance.

My watch read nine thirty. We had maybe a half hour before the trial began.

Arturas came through security and then hefted a large, Samsonite suitcase off the rollers after it had been through the X-ray scanner. He put it down on the floor and wheeled it behind him as he came over.

“Well done,” he said.

I said nothing. He reached behind me and pressed the elevator button.

The elevator doors opened, and I pressed the button for the fourteenth floor, which housed court sixteen. Arturas pressed the top floor, floor nineteen.

“We’re in court sixteen. It’s on the fourteenth floor,” I said.

“We have a room upstairs. You need to change for court,” said Arturas.

The doors closed, and I heard the counterweight take off as we began to slowly ascend.

CHAPTER FIVE

As I rode the elevator to the top floor, I couldn’t help but think about the old courthouse that had shaped so much of my life. The Chambers Street Courthouse had made me and broke me. Old-timers who hustled plea bargains in the lower courts called it the “Dracula Hotel,” but no one was really sure why. Some said it was because of a long-serving judge who bore a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi. For me, this courthouse had
actually
served as my hotel for the last six months of my law practice. Jack Halloran and I were trying desperately to fight off the recession and capitalize on the rising crime rate in the city. It could have been a gold mine for the right set of criminal attorneys. So we hit the criminal courts hard. We handled our cases during the day, then hung out and hustled the new arrests at night court. Most defendants didn’t have a lawyer at night court because most law offices were closed, and there were only a limited number of reliable criminal law practices that carried a twenty-four-hour emergency service.

We worked our regular nine-to-five and then split the shifts; on Monday I would do the first court session of five thirty to one a.m.; then Jack took the graveyard shift. We’d swap shifts the next day and so on. By the time I wrapped up a case at, say, three a.m. or sometimes five a.m., there would be little point in me going home, so I’d put my head down in a conference room, or sometimes, if the other lawyers got there first to speak to their clients or get some shut-eye themselves, some of the clerks let me doze in their colleague’s office. Or I might have had a drink with Judge Harry Ford before falling asleep on the couch in his chambers. The only good thing about the Dracula Hotel was that it was free.

The old courthouse was due a health check in the next six months. The money City Hall had spent on refurbishing the outer shell was being reported as wasteful by city management. Most of the upper floors were unoccupied apart from old filing cabinets and furniture that wasn’t worth saving. A lot of the support staff had relocated to the new offices across the street, which was another blow for the campaign to save the building.

The elevator door opened on floor nineteen : a whole floor of unused offices. I’d been up there before in the early hours to sleep before my next hearing. I’d spent more nights sleeping in different parts of the courthouse than I cared to remember. There were few facilities in the building, and the main problem was the lack of conference rooms where you can talk privately with your client. I’d used some of the old offices up there to consult. But aside from the occasional lawyer whispering with a client, or a lawyer catching a power nap, nobody came up there.

A moldy smell seemed to permeate through the walls. No one had been up there to do any cleaning in some time. We turned right out of the elevator, walked along a wide corridor, and then stopped at the second door on the right. Arturas took a set of keys from his coat pocket and slipped one into the lock. The lock looked brand-new. Arturas had planned on bringing me here. He opened the door and went inside, dragging the suitcase behind him. He closed and locked the door after me. The room within served as a large reception area for a judge’s chambers. The reception area contained a stained desk, three green leather, studded couches, and an ancient photocopier.

A yellowed, framed print of the
Mona Lisa
sat above the desk.

Beyond the couches, I saw an inner door to the chambers. I opened the door to the private quarters and saw, straight ahead of me, a long sash window. On the left, a bookcase ran the length of the room. It held law reports and out-of-date textbooks. A small desk and chair sat tight against the bookcase. On the other wall were two rather poor artworks depicting barren Irish countryside scenes set upon peeling, floral wallpaper. One couch sat sullenly below the paintings. The place smelled of old newspapers, and thick dust lay on every surface.

I walked back into the reception room and saw Arturas taking a suit bag from the Samsonite case. He opened it and handed me a neatly folded pair of black suit pants. The jacket he placed on the chair. He then produced a white shirt, still in its packaging, and a new red tie.

Apart from my overcoat, I wore light chinos and a navy blazer over a blue shirt.

“Take off the coat,” said Arturas.

I removed my overcoat, and as I did so, the thin jacket that contained the bomb came off as well and slid out of my coat. As it fell to the floor, its deadly contents dragging it earthward, I dove into the judge’s chambers and covered my head.

Nothing.

Then laughter.

Feeling foolish, I got up and came back into the room. The jacket lay crumpled on the floor, and Arturas was smiling.

“Don’t worry. You need a charge to set off the bomb. You could bounce it off the walls and it would not detonate. You need this to set it off.” He produced something small and black from the pocket of his brown overcoat. It looked like a central locking pad for a car : a little plastic oval about the same size as a matchbox. It had two buttons—one green, one red. “One button to arm it, one to set it off. The bomb is not very large. It has a kill zone of four or five feet, no more,” said Arturas.

He picked up the thin jacket and laid it out flat on the reception desk.

Someone knocked. Arturas opened the door to the tall, blond Russian I’d met in the limo, the one Volchek called Victor. The big man closed the door and fixed his eyes upon me.

Arturas returned to the reception desk, opened the Velcro seam of the thin silk jacket, and removed the device that I’d felt through the material : two thin, rectangular blocks of hard putty with what looked to be a circuit board on top. Wires ran from the circuit board to something else. It could have been the inner workings of an old pager or something like that. More wires ran from this to the off-white plastic explosive. The whole thing looked to be around the same size as a pocket notepad. It was thin, and despite
the damage it could do, it didn’t weigh much. Arturas lifted the suit jacket that he’d left on the chair. He placed it inside out on the desk and began running his hands along the lining. He’d known that I would need a suit for court. This one looked as though it had been custom tailored to conceal the device in a hidden pocket in the back of the jacket. He closed the seam after he secured the bomb, then lifted the jacket. I couldn’t tell there was something hidden in the back. It looked perfectly normal.

“Get changed,” said Arturas.

Lifting the pants, the shirt, the tie, and my overcoat, I moved into the chambers office. “You don’t mind?” I said.

He shook his head.

The pants were a good fit. The white shirt was way too big at the collar, but the blue button-down I was already wearing would do. I left the rest of my clothes and the tie in the chambers and went back into the reception room to try on the jacket. Arturas held it open for me, like a salesman. Turning, I held my arms out behind me and he slipped the sleeves onto my arms and threaded it up and over my shoulders. I thought it was a little big, like the shirt. Arturas strode around me, checking the angles, smoothing down the material, making sure it looked normal.

“It will do well. The white shirt was too big?” he said.

“Yeah. Too much room in the collar.”

He nodded.

Without another word, I went back into the chambers and folded my collar up so I could put on the tie. The Russians were in my peripheral vision. Arturas was closing up the large suitcase, which still looked plenty full. Victor watched Arturas. Before they could notice, I picked up my overcoat and drew out the wallet that I’d lifted from the big Russian in the limo. If the jacket were a size or two smaller, it would have been a problem concealing the wallet in the inside pocket of my new suit. With the extra width, no one would notice. I couldn’t risk taking a look at the wallet just yet; I would have to wait. It was likely that I would find nothing useful in the wallet. But I was damn glad that I had it. The mere fact that I’d been able to pocket it without being seen gave me some hope that the skills I’d learned so long ago had not deserted me completely.
Opening and closing my fists and rolling my shoulders, I tried to calm myself and let my mind absorb the situation.

A dirty mirror sat in the corner of the bookcase. I wiped the layer of dust from it and made sure my tie was straight.

There was no denying it; every time I put on a suit and looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a lawyer. I saw a con man.

A man just like my father.

Lifting a wallet unobserved is no easy task. It takes a long time to learn how to complete the perfect pocket dip. You need quick, easy hands, steady nerves, and the ability to either take off or take down the mark. I learned from one of the best cannons in the business, a true pickpocket artist—my dad, Pat Flynn. Most pickpockets don’t like to be called ‘pickpockets,’ and always refer to themselves as cannons. My abiding memory of my father is him sitting in his armchair in front of the TV, eyes heavy, breathing slowly, looking almost dead or asleep, and all the while he would be running a quarter over his knuckles like droplets of mercury slipping over a fork.

For a big guy, he had dainty little hands, and each individual finger moved like a dancer : fast, fluid, clean. Much to my mother’s disapproval, my dad ran an illegal gambling ring out of the back of McGonagall’s Bar in Brooklyn. He’d been a con artist and a smuggler in Dublin until he’d saved enough to buy a ticket to America. When he got off the boat, he went straight to the nearest diner and ordered his first hamburger. He didn’t tip his nineteen-year-old waitress, and she chased him for four blocks before finally catching him. He gave her a huge tip, used his God-given charm, and they started dating. The waitress was a second-generation Italian girl named Isabella. My parents, Pat and Isabella, married in secret a year later.

I would go down to the bar after school and drink a soda while I watched my dad run his crew. At the height of his little operation, he had maybe forty runners hustling the action on dogs, horses, boxing, and football. Once he’d dealt with his runners, we’d shoot a game of pool. Then he’d lift me up onto a barstool, plant his worn red book beside him, and teach me how to palm a card, a dime, a silver dollar, a watch, how to dip for leather while looking
the mark in the eye, how to fold a ten-dollar bill and make it look like a hundred, how to signal your shill for the perfect distraction while you made the dip, how to hide money in your clothes so no one could find it, and more, much more. I still remember the taste of the Dr. Peppers, the citrus smell of his aftershave, the smoothness of the polished rosewood bar, and beneath it, my dad’s pretty hands working their magic.

At first he had refused to teach me. Even then, at age eight, I could be persuasive, and eventually I wore him down. He agreed to teach me on two conditions. The first was that we kept the lessons secret; Mom was never to know. Second, if he was going to teach me, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to stop me from honing my skills on the street, so the next best thing in his mind was to make sure that if I did make a slip, I would be able to defend myself. After an hour or so working on my form at the bar, he’d take me to the gym and watch me learn how to box. Mom didn’t know about any of it. She worked late, waiting tables at a restaurant ten blocks away. It was our secret, me and my dad’s. When Mom came home from her shift, my dad always had something hot waiting for her. Then she’d curl up on the couch with a romance novel, the trashier the better, and read until she fell asleep. By the time I’d turned fourteen, I’d beaten every decent fighter in the district, including kids two and three years older than me. I was fast, I hit hard, and I didn’t go down easy. My dad wanted me to get better, so after our session in the bar, we’d take the E train to Lexington Avenue and I’d spar in Mickey Hooley’s gym on 54th Street against the best young fighters that Hell’s Kitchen had to offer. That’s where I met most of the guys who ended up in my crew. And one particular guy, a squat little boy with a sledgehammer right cross, by the name of Jimmy Fellini, who quickly became my best pal. Jimmy would go on to be a promising amateur boxer, and I watched every one of his fights. We were brothers back then. But Jimmy missed out on his shot at turning pro.