When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Page 22

"All right."
"Get off, let me think, probably the best place is Ocean Avenue. You'll probably see a sign."
"Hang on," Skip said. "I think I got a map someplace, I saw it the other day."
He found a Hagstrom street map of the borough and the three of us gave it some study. Bobby Ruslander leaned in over Kasabian's shoulder. Billie Keegan picked up a beer somebody had abandoned earlier and took a sip and made a face. We worked out a route, and Skip told John to take the map along with him.
"I can never fold these things right," Kasabian said.
Skip said, "Who cares how you fold the fucking thing?" He took the map away from his partner and began tearing it along some of its fold lines, handing a section some eight inches square to Kasabian and dropping the rest to the floor. "Here's Sheepshead Bay," he said. "You want to know where to get off the parkway, right? What do you need with all the rest of fucking Brooklyn?"
"Jesus," Kasabian said.
"I'm sorry, Johnny. I'm fuckin' twitchy. Johnny, you got a weapon?"
"I don't want anything."
Skip opened the desk drawer, put a blue-steel automatic pistol on top of the desk. "We keep it behind the bar," he told me, "case we want to blow our brains out when we count up the night's receipts. You don't want it, John?" Kasabian shook his head. "Matt?"
"I don't think I'll need it."
"You don't want to carry it?"
"I'd just as soon not."
He hefted the gun, looked for a place to put it. It was a.45 and it looked like the kind they issue to officers in the army. A big heavy gun, and what they called a forgiving one- its stopping power could compensate for poor aim, bringing a man down with a shoulder wound.
"Weighs a fucking ton," Skip said. He worked it underneath the waistband of his jeans and frowned at the way it looked. He tugged his shirt free of his belt, let it hang out over the gun. It wasn't the sort of shirt you wear out of your pants and it looked all wrong. "Jesus," he complained, "where am I gonna put the thing?"
"You'll work it out," Kasabian told him. "Meanwhile we ought to get going. Don't you think so, Matt?"
I agreed with him. We went over it one more time while Keegan and Ruslander walked on ahead. They would drive to Sheepshead Bay and park across the street from the restaurant, but not directly across the street. They would wait there, motor off, lights out, and keep an eye on the place and on us when we arrived.
"Don't try and do anything," I told him. "If you see anything suspicious, just observe it. Write down license numbers, anything like that."
"Should I try and follow them?"
"How would you know who you were following?" He shrugged. "Play it by ear," I said. "Mostly just be around, keep an eye open."
"Got it."
After he'd left Skip put an attach case on top of the desk and popped the catches. Banded stacks of used currency filled the case. "That's what fifty grand looks like," he said. "Doesn't look like much, does it?"
"Just paper."
"It do anything for you, looking at it?"
"Not really."
"Me either." He put the.45 on top of the bills, closed the case. It didn't fit right. He rearranged the bills to make a little nest for the gun and closed it again.
"Just until we get in the car," he said. "I don't want to walk down the street like Gary Cooper in High Noon." He tucked his shirt back into his pants. On the way to the car he said, "You'd think people'd be staring at me. I'm dressed like a grease monkey and carrying a case like a banker. Fucking New Yorkers, I could wear a gorilla suit and nobody'd look twice. Remind me, soon as we get in the car, I want to take the gun out of the case."
"All right."
"Bad enough if they pull something and shoot us. Be worse if they used my gun to do it."
HIS car was garaged on Fifty-fifth Street. He tipped the attendant a buck and drove around the corner, pulled up in front of a hydrant. He opened the attach case and removed the pistol and checked the clip, then put the gun on the seat between us, thought better of it and wedged it down into the space between the cushion and the seat back.
The car was a Chevy Impala a couple of years old, long and low, loosely sprung. It was white, with a beige and white interior, and it looked as though it hadn't been through a car wash since it left Detroit. The ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts and the floor was deep in litter.
"Car's like my life," he said as we caught a light at Tenth Avenue.
"A comfortable mess. What do we do, take the same route we worked out for Kasabian?"
"No."
"You know a better way?"
"Not better, just different. Take the West Side Drive for now, but instead of the Belt we'll take local streets through Brooklyn."
"Be slower, won't it?"
"Probably. Let them get there ahead of us."
"Whatever you say. Any particular reason?"
"Might be easier this way to see if we're being followed."
"You think we are?"
"I don't see the point offhand, not when they know where we're going. But there's no way to know whether we're dealing with one man or an army."
"That's a point."
"Take a right the next corner, pick up the Drive at Fifty-sixth Street."
"Got it. Matt? You want something?"
"What do you mean?"
"You want a pop? Check the glove box, there ought to be something there."
There was a pint of Black & White in the glove compartment. Actually it wouldn't have been a pint, it would have been a tenth. I remember the bottle, green glass, curved slightly like a hip flask to fit comfortably in a pocket.
"I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm kind of wired. I don't want to get sloppy, but it might not hurt to have something to take the edge off."
"Just a short one," I agreed, and opened the bottle.
WE took the West Side Drive to Canal Street, crossed into Brooklyn via the Manhattan Bridge, and took Flatbush Avenue until it crossed Ocean Avenue. We kept catching red lights, and several times I noticed his gaze fixing on the glove box. But he didn't say anything, and we left the bottle of Black & White untouched after the one short pull each of us had taken earlier.
He drove with his window rolled down all the way and his left elbow out the window, his fingertips resting on the roof, occasionally drumming the metal. Sometimes we made conversation and sometimes we rode along in silence.
At one point he said, "Matt, I want to know who set this up. It's gotta be inside, don't you think? Somebody saw an opportunity and took it, somebody who took a look at the books and knew what he was looking at. Somebody who used to work for me, except how would they get back in? If I fired some asshole, some drunk bartender or spastic waitress, how do they wind up prancing into my office and waltzing out with my books? Can you figure that?"
"Your office isn't that hard to get into, Skip. Anybody familiar with the layout could head for the bathroom and slip into your office without anybody paying any attention."
"I suppose. I suppose I'm lucky they didn't piss in the top drawer while they were at it." He drew a cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket, tapped it against the steering wheel. "I owe Johnny five grand," he said.
"How's that?"
"The ransom. He came up with thirty and I put up twenty. His safe-deposit box was in better shape than mine. For all I know he's got another fifty tucked away, or maybe the thirty was enough to tap him." He braked, letting a gypsy cab change lanes in front of us. "Look at that asshole," he said, without rancor. "Do people drive like that everywhere or is it just Brooklyn? I swear everybody starts driving funny the minute you cross the river. What was I talking about?"
"The money Kasabian put up."
"Yeah. So he'll cut a few bills extra per week until he makes up the five-grand difference. Matt, I had twenty thousand dollars in a bank vault and now it's all packed up and ready for delivery, and in a few minutes I won't have it anymore, and it's got no reality. You know what I mean?"
"I think so."
"I don't mean it's just paper. It's more than paper, if it was just paper people wouldn't go so nuts over it. But it wasn't real when it was locked up tight in the bank and it won't be real when it's gone. I have to know who's doing this to me, Matt."
"Maybe we'll find out."
"I fucking have to know. I trust Kasabian, you know? This kind of business you're dead if you can't trust your partner. Two guys in the bar business watching each other all the time, they're gonna go flat fucking nuts in six months. Never make it work, the place'll have the kind of vibe a Bowery bum wouldn't tolerate. On top of which you could watch your partner twenty-three hours a day and he could steal you blind in the hour he's got open. Kasabian does the buying, for Christ's sake. You know how deep you can stick it in when you're doing the buying for a joint?"
"What's your point, Skip?"
"My point is there's a voice in my head saying maybe this is a nice way for Johnny to take twenty grand off me, and it doesn't make any sense, Matt. He'd have to split it with a partner, he has to put up a lot of his own cash to do it, and why would he pick this way to steal from me? All aside from the fact that I trust him, I got no reason not to trust him, he's always been straight with me and if he wanted to rip me off there's a thousand easier ways that pay better and I'd never even know I was being taken. But I still get this voice, and I fuckin' bet he gets it, too, because I caught him looking at me a little different earlier, and I probably been looking at him the same way, and who needs this shit? I mean this is worse than what it's costing us. This is the kind of thing makes a joint close up overnight."
"I think that's Ocean Avenue coming up."
"Yeah? And to think we've only been driving for six days and six nights. I hang a left at Ocean?"
"You want to turn right."
"You sure?"
"Positive."
"I'm always lost in Brooklyn," he said. "I swear this place was settled by the Ten Lost Tribes. They couldn't find their way back, they broke ground and built houses. Put in sewer lines, ran in electricity. All the comforts of home."
The restaurants on Emmons Avenue specialized in seafood. One of them, Lundy's, was a great barn of a place where serious eaters would tuck themselves in at big tables for enormous shore dinners. The place we were headed for was two blocks away at a corner. Carlo's Clam House was its name, and its red neon sign winked to show a clam opening and closing.
Kasabian was parked on the other side of the street a few doors up from the restaurant. We pulled up alongside him. Bobby was in the front passenger seat. Billie Keegan sat alone in the back. Kasabian, of course, was behind the wheel. Bobby said, "Took you long enough. If there's anything going on, you can't see it from here."
Skip nodded. We drove a half-block farther and he parked next to a hydrant. "They don't tow you out here," he said. "Do they?"
"I don't think so."