The Lucifer Messiah (5 page)

It didn't take long, though, but then why should it? Something so terrible and unreal?

In a few moments, Sean was standing there before her again. He was naked, dripping in slime and blood. But it was clearly him, and she'd seen every second of his horrid metamorphosis.

“I should have told you. I wanted to. But how could I?” he said, taking a moment to find the words in her language, and then repeating the phrase so she could understand.

She simply stared back at him. She wasn't hurt. She wasn't in pain. But her face had changed. Those eyes that had once been so warm, so dark and so sweet were now cold. Their stare was empty, like a corpse.

He reached out a hand to her, and took a step. A siren blared, and police arrived just around the corner.

“Please. I only want to be with you. I'm sorry,” he said.

But she just ran away.

He wanted to run too, to follow her, but he couldn't. He knew he couldn't.

Instead he fell to his knees. Tears blended with the
muck on his cheeks, and he screamed out her name.

“Orlanda! Orlanda! Orlanda!”

Then he woke up.

Maggie was there by his side. She had a wet towel pressed against his forehead.

“It's only a dream. You're okay. It's just a nightmare, Sean,” she assured him.

He opened his eyes. He saw her through the tears.

“What is Orlanda?” she asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Who,” he answered. “Who.”

V
INCE WAS NO STRANGER TO THE
S
UNSET
C
LUB, OR
to the connected guys who patronized it. His years on the force had been marked by their constant association, payoffs, kickbacks from numbers games, and during Prohibition, the occasional raid. It was unavoidable, a simple fact of life, and not at all as glamorous or exciting as the movie houses made it out to be.

The reality of it was that the rackets were a closed shop, from the beat cops and the back-room bookmakers all the way up to the detectives and the street bosses. The thing they never got right, those Hollywood types with their natty cardboard-cutout lawmen and sneering George Raft bad guys, was that the whole lot crawled out of the same pool. It was a dirty, polluted cesspool of petty fraud and wink-and-a-nod sanctioning, kept alive by enough hard cash to go around, and jolted every now and again by murder when there wasn't.

But it was still just one pool.

Vince had grown up with most of those guys, with
their brothers and cousins, mentored by their fathers and uncles. He knew better than most that among the dingy pubs and taverns of the West Side, the Bowery, and the Lower East Side that cops and hoods alike spent as much time rehashing twenty-year-old stickball games and sordid tales of the girls back in the day as they did discussing their actual business.

Which wasn't to say that nothing ever got done. When the busts were made, they were made. When there was a score to settle, it got settled. Bad blood fueled more posturing and backstabbing than just about any other motive, except perhaps the old reliable green.

But two sides? Cops against robbers, white hats against black?

It had never been, nor would it ever be that simple.

Nevertheless, Vince found himself taking a few deep breaths as he crossed Mulberry Street at the corner of Hester. The steamed-up kitchen windows were open at Gennaro's across the street, slathering the cold breeze with welcome drafts of breaded veal cutlets frying in olive oil. He politely sidestepped a pair of hunched little widows in black shawls chattering to each other in Sicilian, and pushed open the creaky old side door to the Sunset.

It was suitably dim and quiet inside. The thick shades were drawn over the windows, as always. The house lights were set on low.

Vince scanned the room. The un-lacquered tabletops were bare. Some of the chairs were still upside-down on top of them. The black-and-white tile floor was wet in places
from a recent mopping. But near the back, a few seats were occupied. One in particular caught his attention, beneath a cheap painting of Garibaldi holding a tri-color emblem.

“Hey, Paulie Tonsils,” the ex-cop said, recognizing an old pal with a cigar and a bad comb-over sitting under the hero's portrait.

Paulo Giannini had gotten his nickname when he was seventeen, almost half a decade after he began working for Sam Calabrese. Most kids had their tonsils out in grade school, or a little later. Paulie, however, had been laid up for weeks when his throat glands finally got bad enough to require extraction—about a month before high-school graduation.

The boys had kidded him about it for so long, getting a child's operation when he was almost eighteen that the name had stuck. Now pushing forty, his hair was thinning, and a lifetime of pasta and
vino
was beginning to put a belly on him. But the name lingered.

“Paesan! Che si dice?
You lookin' for some action?” he answered, watching Vince approach from the other side of his own exhaled smoke. “Rangers look pretty good this year.”

“I don't bet hockey,” Vince replied as he sat down.

An Enrico Caruso recording was playing low from a phonograph in the back. It was scratchy from over-use. It skipped a little disconcertingly while Vince settled into the chair.

“Right, smart move,” Paulie answered. “I think we got some college basketball going on, if you want to put somethin' down on that.”

“Yeah, I might lay down a few bucks. St. John's is playing at the Garden, right?” Vince said.

“Yeah. I'll put you down for your usual. Good spread on this one, just between you and me. I think you'll make out on it.”

“Thanks, Paulie.” Vince turned then, out of habit when he heard the door open behind him.

He watched discreetly as a pair of men he had never seen before entered the place from the same unmarked side door he had come through, the door only regulars and good customers ever used. Strangely, though, no one paid them any mind. Not old-time Freddie who sipped his espresso in the corner. Not Mikey, the ancient-looking man behind the bar who never seemed to leave, and not any of the four runners playing cards at a table near the back.

That alone was odd. What was odder still was how the two looked. A bald man so short he was probably a midget, and a guy who Vince imagined would make a good Tonto from the Lone Ranger radio show. Vince wasn't quite sure what to say.

“Who the hell was that?” he managed, once they had passed.

The balding wiseguy smiled half a smile. He looked like he wanted to say a lot, but he responded briefly.

“Coupla new guys.”

The answer did not satisfy the ex-cop.

“I heard you had some new faces around here. But what gives? Frankie don't trust nobody that didn't grow up within spittin' distance of the neighborhood. And I can tell
you right now those freaks ain't from the neighborhood.”

Paulie took a long draw from his Macanudo. The full, sweet smoke seemed in no hurry to ease its way out of his mouth. He rather carefully checked to his left and to his right before he spoke again, trying hard not to look like he was trying hard.

His voice fell into a self-conscious whisper.

“He didn't. I don't neither. Ain't you heard, though? Frankie ain't around no more. Hasn't been for about three months.”

“No. I didn't hear anything. If somebody took out Little Frankie, I think I'd have heard something.”

Paulie shook his head. His eyes strayed away from Vince's sight. For the moment, the plain surface of the table was all that he wanted to see.

“We don't know that somebody took him out, not yet, anyway. Believe me, I don't mind tellin' you Vince, cop or nothin', if I knew anything, I'd take care of it myself. All we know is that he left one day and nobody's seen him since.”

“And Sam? What's he say?”

Paulie looked up, just so Vince could tell that he wanted to conversation to end.

“Tell you the God's honest truth, he don't seem to care one bit. But the boss ain't really been himself lately. Gettin' a little nuts in his old age, if you know what I mean.”

“So I heard. Listen, I'll be back tomorrow to pick up my cash. Good spread, right?” Vince said, getting up to leave.

“You know it.”

With one more look to the rear, where the newcomers
had settled in the shadows, Vincent buttoned his coat, paid his respects to old Freddie, and left.

“Who was that, Paulie?” Indian Joe asked, not a moment later. Paulie had not heard him approach.

“Oh, him? Vinny Sicario. Used to be a cop around here, grew up over on the West Side, Hell's Kitchen, you know? Good guy, good customer. He drops a couple hundred in here every summer.”

“Every summer?”

“Yeah, you know, baseball season. Big Yankee fan, old Vince. You gotta get with the program here Joey, what the hell do you do all day upstairs?” Paulie tried to use humor to mask his unease at dealing with the giant Native American. It usually didn't work.

“What did he want?”

“Nothin'. Just talkin', you know.”

Joseph nodded, and walked away.

The little bodega store was out of Lucky Strike cigarettes. That meant Vince was going to have to settle for Marlboro, or maybe Pall Mall. It also meant he was going to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

Having met with failure seeking the first item on his informal list, he ran quickly through the other things he needed. Juice. Canned soup. As usual, he couldn't remember too many. Maggie was going to be mad at him.

The place didn't sell bandages, but they had dishrags
and twine, good enough to dress a wound temporarily. There wasn't any hydrogen peroxide either, which meant he'd have to make due with another disinfectant. He looked at rubbing alcohol, a large bottle. At least then he wouldn't have to waste any more whiskey.

Vince had been a cop for almost twenty years, from the time he got back from the Navy in the spring of '22 until he drank himself off the force in late '41. Those years walking the streets had done several things for him. They'd left him with a slight limp and a near-suicidal drinking habit. But the time spent wandering the streets had also honed his instincts. Even years removed from his days in blue, his senses were keen. He knew when things weren't quite right. And that was the feeling that came over him as he compared the sizes of rubbing alcohol bottles in the back aisle of the store.

Someone was watching him.

He could feel the gaze. It was heavy, the way a cat watches a mouse before pouncing. The stillness was what gave it away. The lack of ordinary movement. When a guy follows you, Vince knew from experience, he tends to focus on you to the exclusion of everything else, including his own demeanor. It was a pitfall that he himself had always sought to avoid, but had fallen into often, nevertheless.

That was what he sensed now, even before he turned around. The area behind him was too quiet, too still.

Cognizant of the presence, he did nothing. It was exactly what he was supposed to do. He continued browsing, picked the bottle of alcohol with the cheapest price
and made his way toward the register at the front. As he walked, he pretended to scan the aisle to his left. It was a magazine rack, filled with pulp rags and tabloids, but it was what lurked behind the rack that piqued his interest.

It was a man, Spanish from the look of his skin, olive like an Italian, but with eyes that were too narrow to be a paisan. The fellow was short, and somewhat disheveled, with matted black hair that hung over his eyes. Vince was certain he was the one.

He didn't keep an eye on the man. He just kept walking. At the front register he greeted the elderly woman behind the counter, made idle chit-chat and paid for his stuff. When he left he caught a glimpse of the other man pausing, and then following.

Brown paper bag braced in his arms, Vince walked in the exact opposite direction of his apartment.

The other man kept a good distance, and Vince was sure that his pursuer was unaware that he was on to him. He crossed at Forty-Second and Eighth, over to the east-side of the street. There he set his bag on the ground and knelt down. He untied and then retied his shoe, and got his best look yet at the Spanish man, who waited in an unassuming manner on the other end of the busy intersection.