“Sure, kid. Two minutes.” Mother? The whore! Il pinguino! Louis walked to his mirrored marble bar with the pink angels flying over the Lalique inset above the whisky bottles. He poured himself a drink and took several calming swallows. The bar phone rang. “Yeah?” he said, carefully picking up the fragile crystal instrument.
“It’s me, Lou. Frankie. I said good-bye to Mama.”
“That’s a good boy, Frankie. Never forget your mama.”
“Oh, I never do, Lou. You taught me that. You told me you gave your mama the biggest funeral they ever saw in East Hartford.”
“Yeah, I bought the fuckin’ church, man.”
“Real nice, real nice.”
“Now let’s get to something else real nice, okay? It’s been one of those days, Frankie, lots of turmoil, you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Lou.”
“So I got an itch. I gotta get some relief. Come on over here, Frankie.”
“As fast as a cab can take me, Lou.”
Prostituto! It would be Frankie the Big Mouth’s last service for him.
Out on the street the well-dressed attorney walked two blocks south and a block east to his waiting limousine parked beneath the canopy of another impressive residence in Brooklyn Heights. His stocky chauffeur of middle years was talking pleasantly with the uniformed doorman, whom he had generously tipped by now. Spotting his employer, the driver walked rapidly to the limousine’s rear door and opened it. Several minutes later they were in traffic heading for the bridge.
In the quiet of the backseat, the lawyer undid his alligator belt, pressed the upper and lower rims of the buckle, and a small cartridge fell out between his legs. He picked it up and refastened the belt.
Holding the cartridge up to the filtered light from the window, he studied the miniaturized voice-activated recording device. It was an extraordinary machine, tiny enough and with an acrylic mechanism that permitted it to fly through the most sophisticated detectors. The attorney leaned forward in his seat and spoke to the driver. “William?”
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur glanced up at his rearview mirror and saw his employer’s outstretched hand; he reached back.
“Take this over to the house and put it on a cassette, will you, please?”
“Right, Major.”
The Manhattan lawyer reclined in the seat, smiling to himself. Louis would give him anything he wanted from now on. A capo did not make side arrangements where the family was concerned, to say nothing of acknowledging certain sexual preferences.
Morris Panov sat blindfolded in the front seat of the sedan with his guard, his hands loosely, almost courteously bound, as if the capo subordinato felt he was following unnecessary orders. They had been driving for about thirty minutes in silence when the guard spoke.
“What’s a perry-oh-dentist?” he asked.
“An oral surgeon, a doctor trained to operate inside patients’ mouths on problems relating to teeth and gum tissue.” Silence. Then seven minutes later: “What kind of problems?”
“Any number of them, from infections to scraping the roots to more complicated surgery usually in tandem with an oncologist.”
Silence. Four minutes later: “What was that last—the tandy-uncle stuff?”
“Oral cancer. If it’s caught in time, it can be arrested with minor bone removal. … If not, the entire jaw might have to go.” Panov could feel the car briefly swerve as the driver momentarily lost control.
Silence. A minute and a half later: “The whole fuckin’ jaw? Half the face?”
“It’s either that or the whole of the patient’s life.” Thirty seconds later: “You think I could have something like that?”
“I’m a doctor, not an alarmist. I merely noted a symptom, I did not make a diagnosis.”
“So bullshit! So make a dagassnossis!”
“I’m not qualified.”
“Bullshit! You’re a doctor, ain’t you? I mean a real doctor, not a fasullo who says he is but ain’t got no shingle that’s legit.”
“If you mean medical school, yes, I’m that kind of doctor.”
“So look at me!”
“I can’t. I’m blindfolded.” Panov suddenly felt the guard’s thick strong hand clawing at his head, yanking the kerchief off him. The dark interior of the automobile answered a question for Mo: How could anyone travel in a car with a blindfolded passenger? In that car it was no problem; except for the windshield, the windows were not merely tinted, they were damn near opaque, which meant from the outside they were opaque. No one could see inside.
“Go on, look!” The capo subordinato, his eyes on the road, tilted his large head grotesquely toward Panov; his thick lips were parted and his teeth bared like those of a child playing monster in the mirror, he shouted again. “So tell me what you see!”
“It’s too dark in here,” replied Mo, seeing essentially what he wanted to see in the front window; they were on a country road, so narrow and so country the next step lower was dirt. Wherever he was being taken, he was being driven there by an extremely circuitous route.
“Open the fuckin’ window!” yelled the guard, his head still twisted, his eyes still on the road, his gaping mouth approaching a caricature of Orca, the about-to-vomit whale. “Don’t hold nothin’ back. I’ll break every goddamn finger in that prick’s hands! He can do his fuckin’ surgery with his elbows! … I told that stupid sister of mine he was no fuckin’ good, that fairy. Always readin’ books, no action on the street, y’know what I mean?”
“If you’ll stop shouting for a few seconds, I can get a closer look,” said Panov, having lowered the window at his side, seeing nothing but trees and the coarse underbrush of a distinctly backcountry road, one he doubted was on too many maps. “There we are,” continued Mo, raising his loosely bound hands to the capo’s mouth, his eyes, however, not on that mouth but on the road ahead. “Oh, my God!” cried Panov.
“What?” screamed the guard.
“Pus. Pockets of pus everywhere. In the upper and lower mandibles. The worst sign.”
“Oh, Christ!” The car swerved wildly, but it did not swerve enough.
A huge tree. Up ahead. On the left-hand side of the deserted road! Morris Panov surged his bound hands over to the wheel, lifting his body off the seat as he propelled the steering wheel to the left. Then at the last second before the car hit the tree, he hurled himself to the right, curling into a fetal position for protection.
The crash was enormous. Shattered glass and crushed metal accompanied the rising mists of steam from burst cylinders, and the growing fires of viscous fluids underneath that would soon reach a gas tank. The guard was moaning, semiconscious, his face bleeding; Panov pulled him out of the wreck and into the grass as far as he could until exhaustion overtook him, just before the car exploded.
In the moist overgrowth, his breath somewhat restored but his fear still at the forefront, Mo released his loosely bound hands and picked the fragments of glass out of his guard’s face. He then checked for broken bones—the right arm and the left leg were candidates—and with stolen stationery from a hotel he had never heard of from the capo’s pocket, he used the guard’s pen to write out his diagnosis. Among the items he removed was a gun—what kind, he had no idea—but it was heavy and too large for his pocket and sagged in his belt.
Enough. Hippocrates had his limits.
Panov searched the guard’s clothing, astonished at the money that was there—some six thousand dollars—and the various driver’s licenses—five different identities from five different states. He took the money and the licenses to turn them over to Alex Conklin, but he left the capo’s wallet otherwise intact. There were photographs of his family, his children, grandchildren and assorted relatives—and somewhere among them a young surgeon he had put through medical school. Ciao, amico, thought Mo as he crawled over to the road, stood up and smoothed his clothes, trying to look as respectable as possible.
Standing on the hard coarse surface, common sense dictated that he continue north, in the direction the car was heading; to return south was not only pointless but conceivably dangerous. Suddenly, it struck him.
Good God! Did I just do what I just did?
He began to tremble, the trained psychiatrically oriented part of him telling him it was posttraumatic stress.
Bullshit, you asshole. It wasn’t you!
He started walking, and then kept walking and walking and walking. He was not on a backcountry road, he was on Tobacco Road. There were no signs of civilization, not a car in either direction, not a house—not even the ruins of an old farmhouse—or a primitive stone wall that would at least have proved that humans had visited the environs. Mile after mile passed and Mo fought off the effects of the drug-induced exhaustion. How long had it been? They had taken his watch, his watch with the day and date in impossible small print, so he had no idea of either the present time or the time that had elapsed since he had been taken from Walter Reed Hospital. He had to find a telephone. He had to reach Alex Conklin! Something had to happen soon!