The Finder: A Novel (28 page)

Sometimes these old men meet each other at the Primeburger, and if you pretend to be deaf and never look at them, you can hear their conversations.
He got a great price on that lot on 56th Street . . . They were once a very fine firm
. . . I
heard the painting might be available for a private buyer . . . The margins are way too tight, he needs to unload . . .

Like that, millions being rearranged among the tuna salad sandwich, the coleslaw, the baked apple.

This was where Martz was headed. Far chair at the counter. He eased down on a rotating stool. An old black waiter drifted over, eyes unblinking. "Menu?"

Martz waved it away. "Turkey club, orange juice, apple pie."

The sandwich appeared in less than two minutes.

"You remember me?" Martz asked.

"Depends who's asking," said the waiter.

"I'm asking."

"Then yes, I do remember you."

"Thought so. You seen Elliot around?"

"Expect he'll be here for lunch in about half an hour."

Martz nodded. He knew this, of course, though it had been years since he'd seen Elliot. One of the consolations of age: your friends didn't change their habits. They
died
but they didn't change.

When he was done eating, he picked up a packet of sweetener, tore off the corner, emptied the white powder onto his plate, and then took
out a pencil and underlined five letters in the word NUTRASWEET: the T, R, S, and double E, then drew an arrow from the S to the end of the word. What did you get? TREES. He handed the empty packet to the waiter. "I would take it as a great favor if you would give that to Elliot."

"Yes, sir." The waiter betrayed no reaction at the oddity of the item and instead tucked the packet into his breast pocket.

"Appreciate it," said Martz. He finished his apple pie, then slipped a fifty-dollar bill beneath his empty plate. He checked the waiter's face. But he was writing up the tab, which he set down on the counter, the big bill and the plate already gone.

As, a moment later, was Martz, toothpick in his mouth, shambling along Fifty-first Street, teeth set, hating everyone, especially himself.

Get your money fast.
Across the street from the sewerage yard sat a check-cashing operation that was always busy on Friday nights. Because the place received two armored truck deliveries each week, and because workers walked out with wads of cash, the building had three security cameras trained on the outside. The windows were full of advertisements for cash-wiring services specializing in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. For all the immigrants sending money back home. This afternoon's customers, most Latino men in work clothes and baseball caps, stood in a neat line, responsive to the quasi-governmental spareness of the room, which was festooned with official notices about fees, currency rates, and identity theft—not to mention the threatening signs announcing that the premises were under twenty-four-hour surveillance and that all deliveries were made by armored truck drivers licensed to carry "and use" firearms. Victor pushed his way in, a paper bag from the liquor store under his arm. The Nigerian man behind the glass nodded at him in familiarity; half of Victor's laborers used the place.

"Violet in?"

"Upstairs."

"Tell her."

The man picked up his phone, spoke a minute, nodded at Victor. "She says five minutes."

He nodded. Sat back and waited, and by habit inspected the line of
men and women waiting to cash their checks. You could tell a lot about them, especially the men, he thought. Male human beings, he'd come to learn, more or less fell into four categories by the time they had reached forty. There were the guys who had it made (done, game over) because they were professionals of one sort or another or worked for big companies or owned something so big and fabulous that made so much money that they could call whatever shots they wanted. They had money packed away in places most people never heard of. They had wives and children or maybe second wives. They didn't worry when they needed a new car; they just bought it. At very most 5 percent of men fell into this category, by Victor's reckoning. You saw them on the subway with their laptop computers, their good office shoes, their soft hands. Almost all had gone to college. No doubt this small group of men could be separated further in smaller categories, but for his purposes, the 5 percent was enough. Victor hated these guys. Then there were the guys who were industrious and smart and who were working every angle they could think of, guys with roofing companies that employed thirty men and who flipped a little real estate on the side, bada-boom, guys who maybe cut a few corners but were good with people, kept things moving along. This group included the local lawyers who took every piece of business that came their way, neighborhood accountants who did a little keep-it-vague bookkeeping as necessary, and so on. Lots of guys running restaurants fell into this category. Victor himself fell into this category, although once he had his gas station, got the money rolling, things would be different for him. Guys in this group worked too hard, considering. They might make it into the 5 percent category, except ten years later, and never with any peace of mind. Some of these second-tier guys were happily married, many were not. Many of them fucked around and hurt their momentum that way. Dissipated themselves. Drank or smoked too much, lost a lot of mornings. Victor, yeah you could say that about him, although he had that natural resilience and stamina most men could only dream about, weak motherfuckers. Then the third group was the guys who weren't going to make it. Instead of running roofing companies, they were still working on roofs, which by the time you hit forty was a very
bad idea—the cold and heat and heavy work wore you down, busted your joints. These were the guys who had missed out, or restarted their lives so many times already that nothing was ever going to take. Too many women, jobs, apartments, nights that went bad. They lost stuff—they lost money, friends, jobs, car keys, their cell phones, anything they needed they lost. They were slowly sinking and maybe they knew it but probably they didn't, not yet, anyway. Richie had been one of these guys, two paychecks away from being flat busted. Tried to pick up work on the side, didn't much. Never got any momentum. Women were good at identifying these guys. Men with old pickup trucks, men who bought cheap beer by the case, men who couldn't remember who the vice president of the United States was. Often they had muscles from the work but had started to waste away from the smoking. Got those cigarette bodies, lanky, almost diseased looking. Fingertips always stained. Jacks-of-too-many-trades. Credit bad, prospects slim. One fall off a roof, one cracked-up car, one bad fight in a bar, and they were hanging on by their teeth.

And then, of course, there was the fourth category, the deadbeats and losers who were crashing on somebody's couch or living inside their truck or moved before the rent check was due or lived off a woman somehow, either a mother (pretending to "look after" her) or, more likely, some divorced woman who needed some kind of man around to holler at her children for her or, worst case of all, lived with one of the many different kinds of crazy women who usually ended up getting the worse end of the stick. Most of these guys were boozers or beaters, child abusers, freaks. Fucking animals.

Meanwhile, Vic had dreams and self-discipline. He made plans and stuck to them. Figured the angle, as he was doing now with Ears. He had to take the right line of action, trust no one, especially the people who said they were his friends. Richie was supposed to be a friend but got whacked because he did something wrong, drew attention. The way Vic saw it now was that Ears and whoever he was working for had done a favor for somebody big but also saw a way to work it the other way and create a blackmail situation. That's what Vic would have done, anyway. Somebody high up in some company had ordered something
be done to these two Mexican girls, and Ears and his pals didn't want to share the gold mine. Thought they'd buy off Vic for a lousy twenty, twenty-five Gs. Then go back and blackmail the guy for a couple hundred grand. But they'd screwed up somehow or Richie had talked to somebody and now there was a problem, the guy asking around the yard. That asshole was on a suicide mission, too, and next time Vic saw him, he'd be ready. And Vic wasn't going to get fingered, sorry. Far as he was concerned, he did Richie a favor. Guy never felt a thing. If it had come from Ears, Richie would have suffered. But now Vic had to protect himself, get ahead in the game by a few moves.

"Violet says come on up."

The door buzzed and he pushed through. He passed the small window of the money room; inside, a currency-counting machine spun a blur of bills while an electronic readout kept the tally. Lot of money in a joint like this, lot of money in a neighborhood like this, lot of money in Brooklyn, guy. That's what the tiny-balled motherfuckers in Manhattan didn't understand. We've got some power in this part of town. Fucking Guineas built this city, brick by brick. Sure, the Irish, too. Now, of course, most of the Italian guys were fat and lazy and it was the new foreign guys who worked their asses off. No wonder they were getting all the good businesses. He climbed the stairway, hearing how heavy his footfalls were, a sound he knew well.

The upstairs apartment was owned by Violet Abruzzi, whom he had known all his life. They'd grown up two blocks from each other on Bay Ninth Street and he'd kissed her on the lips in third grade. His father might have porked her mother, though no one ever knew for sure. Which made them some kind of almost half cousins or something in his head. He'd played on the same Catholic school baseball team with Violet's older brother Anthony, a tall guy with a real curveball. Lot of good times back then. The next summer the two of them got beaten down by four newcomer Russian guys; Anthony had lived in a state facility ever since, wearing some kind of neck brace that kept his head from falling backward. One of the Russian guys had broken both of Victor's arms and punched him so many times they thought he was dead. The local detectives had asked Victor what had happened; he
said he didn't remember. Of course the detectives didn't believe him. They knew how things worked. A few months went by, people started to forget. Not Victor. He planned, told no one. Bought a gun, made a silencer for it. What was left of the Russian guy was found under the boardwalk in Coney Island. Whoever did it—a real sicko—had used a fish knife and taken out his eyeballs and put them in the guy's hand. And his nuts in his eye sockets. Message: keep an eye on your balls, asshole. The other Russians, terrorized, moved away the next day. The detectives came back, went through every room of Vic's father's house, every square foot of the yard. Looked through the business records, the supplies, found nothing. But people in the neighborhood thought it was Vic. He was smart enough to say nothing. Violet got very friendly after that. They'd had sex in the local Catholic church a few times, lying down on pew cushions, kept quiet. All kinds of places. She'd gotten pregnant but he wouldn't get married. So she'd had an abortion, a big relief then. After that she'd gotten married a few times. Every time she got married she gained another twenty pounds. No kids, which was probably okay, knowing Violet now. The check-cashing operation had been left her by her late, latest, and probably last husband, a man twenty years her senior, and it was, by any definition, a money machine. They took 4 percent of whatever they handled. Victor knew that the deliveries from the armored car company dropped $350,000 on Monday mornings and $700,000 on Thursday evenings—but forget about holding the place up. He'd studied the situation, of course. The armored car company was mobbed up and Violet herself had a gun license, as did all her employees. And anyway, it was Violet. A few years earlier, a couple of young gansta-punks from East New York had cased the place, busted in screaming robbery, and been shot dead as soon as they came through the office door. It wasn't a bank, where you politely handed over a prepared bag with dye packs on a timer set inside. The police hadn't even picked up the spent shells.

"Hey, baby," came Violet's voice.

The apartment was dark, but he knew his way.

She lay in her bed, smoking, as usual. "You bring me anything?"

He pulled a bottle from the bag. "Drambuie, you like it."

"Sweet, I like sweet. Good for late at night."

Since her teen years, Violet had always had a terrible time sleeping. Now she reached her enormous arm over to her side table and found two glasses. Poured an inch in each.

"Here."

Victor took it in one shot. Then he pulled off his shoes, took his gun from his sock, slipped it into his shoe, took off his pants, folded them. He didn't know why he did this, came to see her. Well, yes, he did. The ugliness excited him.

"Come here," she said.

He stood next to the bed and she hung her head back off the side of the mattress. He moved over her.

"You take a shower in the last week?" she asked.

"The Drambuie will kill the germs."

"You're probably right."

She took him. She was quite good and sucked him hard quickly. She began to finger herself beneath the covers. She moaned a bit. After a minute she pulled him out of her mouth. "All right." He walked around to the other side of the bed. She rolled over and presented her enormous ass upward. This was the ugly part, the part he liked. He slipped in from behind. She had never had kids, so even though she was a size eighteen or twenty-two or whatever the huge size was, she was tight as a glove inside. And Violet was fucked ten or fifteen times a month, so she was really in shape down there. He gave it to her hard for a minute or so, sensed boredom in himself, and made a point of watching the traffic on the boulevard out the window.