A Ticket to the Boneyard

Page 33

"You hang on to it," I suggested. "I can always ask for it back if it's old news."
"True, but-"
"And if it's straight," I said, "I might not be around to pay you. So you'd better take the money now."
"I won't dignify that with an answer," he said.
"But you'll keep the money."
"I doubt I'll keep it long. Crystal's an expensive toy. Do you want to stay for another set, Matthew? If not, would you stop at the bar and tell the little darling it's safe to return? And put your money away, I'll pay for your coffee. My God, you're as bad as Brian."
"I only drank half of that last cup," I told him. "It's not bad for instant, though. You're welcome to the rest of it."
"That's decent of you," he said. "That's real decent."
The cabbie had it all figured out. The only way to handle the crack problem was to cut off the supply. You couldn't lessen the demand because everybody who tried the stuff got addicted to it, and you couldn't seal the borders, and you couldn't control production in Latin America because the dealers were more powerful than the governments.
"So you gotta be the government," he said. "What we do, we annex the fuckers. Take 'em over. Make 'em territories at first, until they shape up and they're ready for statehood. Right away you dry up your drugs at the source. And you got no more wetbacks, because how can people sneak into a country when they're already there? Any place where you got your insurgents, your rebels up in the hills, you declare 'em citizens and draft their asses into the U.S. Army. Next thing you know they got three hots and a cot, they got clean uniforms and GI haircuts and they're shopping at the PX. You do this right, you solve all your problems at once."
He let me out at the ideal place for solving all my problems at once. Tenth and Fiftieth. Grogan's Open House, Michael J. Ballou, proprietor.
I walked in the door and the beer smell reached out to embrace me. The crowd was light and the room was quiet. The jukebox was silent, and nobody was playing darts at the back. Burke was behind the bar with a cigarette in his mouth, trying to make his lighter produce a flame. As I came in he gave me a tiny nod, put down the lighter and lit the cigarette with a match.
I didn't see his lips move but he must have said something because Mick turned at my approach. He was wearing his butcher's apron, more a coat than an apron. It buttoned up to the neck and covered him to the knees. It was gleaming white except where it showed reddish-brown stains. Some of them had faded over the years, and some had not.
"Scudder," he said. "Good man. What will you drink?"
I said a Coke would be fine. Burke filled a glass and slid it across the bar to me. I picked it up, and Mick raised his own glass to me. He was drinking JJ&S, the twelve-year-old Irish that the Jameson people turn out in small quantities. Billy Keegan, who'd worked behind the stick at Armstrong's some years back, used to drink it, and I'd tried it on a few occasions. I could still remember what it tasted like.
"It's a late hour for you," Mick said.
"I was afraid you might be closed."
"When did we ever close at this hour? It's not two yet. We're open till four, as often as not. I bought this bar to have a place for late drinking. Sometimes a man has need of a late night." His eyes narrowed. "Are you all right, man?"
"Why?"
"You look like a man who's been in a fight."
I had to smile. "This afternoon," I said, "but it didn't put a mark on me. A few nights ago it was a different story."
"Oh?"
"Maybe we should sit down."
"Maybe we should," he agreed. He snatched up the whiskey bottle and led the way to a table. I brought my Coke and followed him. As we sat down, someone at the far end of the room played the jukebox and Liam Clancy declared himself to be a freeborn man of the traveling people. The volume was low and the music didn't get in your way, and neither of us said anything until the song had ended.
Then I said, "I need a gun."
"What sort of gun?"
"A handgun. An automatic or a revolver, it doesn't matter. Something small enough to conceal and carry around but heavy enough to have some stopping power."
His glass was still a third full, but he drew the cork stopper from the JJ&S bottle and topped it up, then picked up the glass and looked into it. I wondered what he was seeing.
He drank off some of the whiskey and put the glass down. "Come on," he said.
He stood up, pushed his chair back. I followed him to the back of the room. There was a door to the left of the dart board. Press-on letters announced that it was private, and a lock guaranteed privacy. Mick opened it with a key and ushered me into his office.
It was a surprise. There was a big desk, its top completely clear. A Mosler safe as tall as I was stood off to one side, flanked by a pair of green metal filing cabinets. A brass coatrack held a raincoat and a couple of jackets. There were two groups of hand-colored engravings on the walls, some of Ireland, the others of France. He'd told me once that his mother's people came from County Sligo, his father from a fishing village near Marseilles. Behind the desk there was a much larger picture, a black-and-white photograph with a white mat and a narrow black frame. It showed a white frame farmhouse shaded by tall trees, with hills in the distance and clouds in the sky.
"That's the farm," he said. "You've never been."
"No."
"We'll go one day. It's up near Ellenville. We should have snow soon. That's when I like it the most, when all those hills have snow on them."
"It must be beautiful."
"It is." He went to the safe, worked the combination lock, opened the door. I went over and examined one of the French engravings. It showed sailing boats in a small and well-protected harbor. I couldn't read the caption.
I went on looking at it until I heard the door of the safe swing shut. I turned. He had a revolver in one hand and half a dozen shells in the palm of the other. I went over and he handed me the gun.
"It's a Smith," he said. "Thirty-eight caliber, and the shells are hollow-point, so you won't lack for stopping power. As for accuracy, that's another matter. Someone's cut the barrel down to an inch, and of course that did for the front sight. The rear sight's been filed down, and so's the hammer, so you can't cock it, you have to fire it double-action. It'll go in your pocket and come free without snagging on the lining, but you won't win a turkey shoot with it. You can't really aim it, I don't think. You can only point it."
"That's all right."
"Will it do you, then?"
"It'll do fine," I said. I turned the gun over in my hands, getting the feel of it, smelling the gun oil. There was no powder smell, so it had most likely been cleaned since its last firing.
"It's not loaded," he said. "I've only the six shells. I can make a phone call and get more."
I shook my head. "If I miss him six times," I said, "I can forget the whole thing. He's not going to give me time to reload." I swung the cylinder out and began filling the chambers. You can make a case for leaving one chamber empty so you won't have a live shell under the hammer, but I figured I'd rather have one more bullet in the gun. Besides, with the hammer filed down the possibility of an accidental discharge was slight.
I asked Mick what I owed him.
He shook his head. "I'm not in the business of selling guns," he said.
"Even so."
"I've no money in it," he said. "And no need to see money out of it. Bring it back if you don't use it. Failing that, forget about it."
"It's unregistered?"
"As far as I know. Someone picked it up in a burglary. I couldn't tell you who owned it, but I doubt he registered it. The serial number's gone. A man who licenses his gun rarely files down the number. You're sure it'll do you?"
"I'm sure."
We went back to the other room and he locked the office door. The same Liam Clancy record was playing as we returned to our table. The television set behind the bar was tuned to a western movie, and the sound was too low to carry past the three men watching it. I drank some Coke and Mick drank some Irish.
He said, "What I said before, that I'm not in the gun business. I've been in and out of that business in my day. Did you ever happen to hear the story of the three cases of Kalashnikovs?"
"No."
"Now this was some years ago. It might be long enough that I could tell it in court. It's seven years, isn't it? The statute of limitations?"
"On most felonies. There's no statute of limitations on tax evasion or murder."
"Don't I know it." He picked up his glass and looked at it. "Here's how it was. There were these three cases of Kalashnikovs. AK-47s, you know. Assault rifles. They were in a storage bin in Maspeth, just off Grand Avenue. Big crates they were, with more than thirty rifles in each, so you had close to a hundred in all."
"Whose were they?"
"Ours, once we blew the lock on that storage shed. The crates were too large for the van we had. We broke them open and loaded the rifles into the back of the van. I don't know whose guns they were, but he couldn't own them legally, and he couldn't go to the police about it, could he?" He took a drink. "We already had a buyer for them. You wouldn't steal something like that if you didn't."
"Who was your buyer?"
"Some lads who looked like Hitler's next of kin. Their heads this close to shaved, and the three I saw were dressed alike. Blue shirts with designs on the pocket and khaki trousers. They said they had a training camp in the Adirondacks, up around Tupper Lake. They wanted the guns, and they paid more than they had to, I'll say that for them."
"So you sold them."
"So I did. And two nights later I'm having a drink at Morrissey's, and Tim Pat himself calls me aside. You remember Tim Pat Morrissey."
"Of course."
" 'I hear you've a few extra rifles,' he says. 'Wherever did you hear that?' I say. Well, the whole of it is that he wants the lot of them for some friends of his in the north of Ireland. You knew they were involved in all of that, the brothers. Didn't you?"
"I'd certainly heard as much."
"Well, nothing would do but he must have these rifles. He won't believe I've already sold them. He's sure I couldn't have moved them so quick, you see. 'You don't want them in this country,' he says. 'Think what your man may do with them.' Why, I said, he and his friend will go and play toy soldier with them, or at worst they'll go and shoot a few niggers. 'You don't know that,' he says. 'Maybe they'll start a revolution and storm the governor's mansion. Maybe they'll give the guns to the niggers. Sell them to me and you'll know where they're going.' "
He sighed. "So we stole them back and sold them to Tim Pat. He wouldn't pay the price the little Nazis paid, either. What a bargainer he was! 'You're doing this for Holy Ireland,' he said, driving the price down. Still, when you collect twice for the same fucking guns, any price is a good price."
"Did the original buyers come back at you?"
"Ah," he said. "Now there's the part the statute of limitations doesn't cover. You might say they were in no position to retaliate."