Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

  They got out loud and clumsy, the one in the driver’s seat pressing the remote on his visor so the garage door started closing. The one from the passenger’s seat stomped up the two steps to the door to the kitchen and tried the doorknob, then shook it.

  “What the fuck?” he shouted over the noise of the garage door.

  “What?” the other one said.

  “Door’s fuckin locked.”

  The garage door came to a stop.

  “Bullshit.”

  “It is!”

  “So fuckin open it.”

  “Dick, I don’t have a key!”

  “How about just turning around?” I said. “Slowly.” My voice sounded distant even to myself. Something—the exhaust, the stress—had made me light-headed, and I was worried I would fall.

  They turned around. They didn’t look scared. Just stupid.

  One of them said, “What?”

  The other one said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Cooperate and you won’t get hurt,” I said.

  For a second no one said anything. Then the first one said “What?” and they both started laughing.

  “Fucker,” the other one said, “you are fucking with the wrong two guys.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Cooperate?” the first one said.

  “You knocked over a house in West Orange, a year ago October,” I said. “Killed a couple of geezers. All I want is the tape that was in the VCR you took.”

  They looked at each other. Shook their heads in disbelief.

  The first one said, “Asshole, if we took a VCR from those poor fucks, we sure as hell didn’t keep the tape.”

  I took a breath so I wouldn’t have to for a while. Then I started pulling the triggers.

  Let me tell you about revenge. Particularly murderous revenge.

  It’s a bad idea. For one thing, it doesn’t last. The reason they tell you revenge is best served cold is not so you’ll take the time to get it right, but so you’ll spend longer on the fun part, which is the planning and the expectation.

  For another thing, even if you get away with it, murdering someone is bad for you. It murders something in yourself, and has all kinds of other consequences you can’t possibly foresee. By way of example: eight years after I shot the Virzi brothers, Skinflick completely destroyed my life, and I threw him headfirst out a six-story window.

  But on that night in early 1993, all I could feel was the joy.

  Shooting the Virzi brothers with my silenced .45’s was like holding a photograph of them, then tearing it in half.

  5

  I take Squillante’s cell phone from his hands and twist it into pieces.

  “Talk, asshole,” I tell him.

  He shrugs. “What’s to say? As long as I stay alive, my guy Jimmy won’t call Brooklyn.”

  “Won’t call who in Brooklyn?”

  “A guy of David Locano’s who can get word to him in Beaumont.”

  I make a fist.

  “Relax!” Squillante says. “It’s only in the event of my death!”

  I jerk him up off the bed by the loose skin where his jaw meets his neck. It’s dry, like that of a lizard.

  “In the event of your death?” I say. “Are you fucking insane? You have a terminal illness! You’re already dead!”

  “Les ho I’n ot,” he drools.

  “Hope won’t get either of us shit!”

  He mumbles something. I let his head drop back.

  “What?” I say.

  “Dr. Friendly’s going to operate. He says we might be able to beat this thing.”

  “Who the fuck is Dr. Friendly?”

  “He’s a famous surgeon!”

  “And he operates at Manhattan Catholic?”

  “He operates all over town. He brings his own OR staff.”

  My beeper goes off. I hit the “kill” button.

  “Him and me are gonna beat this together,” Squillante says.

  I slap him. Lightly.

  “Can the shit,” I say. “Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you get to take me with you. Call off your connection to Locano.”

  “No,” he says quietly.

  I slap him a little harder. “Listen, dumbfuck,” I say. “Your chances of living suck as it is. Don’t make me kill you now.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not, if it doesn’t make a difference?”

  He starts to say something, then blinks instead. Starts again. Then begins to cry. He turns his head away and pulls up into as much of a fetal position as his various inputs and outputs will allow.

  “I don’t wanna die, Bearclaw,” he says through the tears.

  “Yeah, well, no one’s asking for your permission. So snap out of it.”

  “Dr. Friendly says I have a chance.”

  “That’s surgeon talk for ‘I need a slightly longer Chris-Craft.’”

  My beeper goes off again. I kill it again. Squillante grabs my forearm with his chimplike hand. “Help me, Bearclaw.”

  “I will if I can,” I tell him. “Call off your guy.”

  “Just get me through the surgery.”

  “I said, I will if I can. Call him off.”

  “If I can just make it through the surgery and get out of here, I promise I will. I’ll take it to my grave. I don’t need to live forever.”

  “Hey there! What kind of talk is that?” a voice says behind me.

  I turn to see a couple of doctors entering the room. One’s a gangly, exhausted-looking resident in scrubs, the other’s a fat cat who’s fifty-five years old. I don’t know either of them. The fat cat’s ruddy, with a truly audacious comb-over—a comb-around-and-around, to be more accurate. But that’s not what’s interesting.

  What’s interesting is the guy’s thigh-length white lab coat. It’s covered with drug-name patches, like something out of NASCAR. And it’s leather. Better still, the patches are over the parts of the body each particular drug works on: Xoxoxoxox (pronounced “zoZOXazox”) over the heart, Rectilify over the sigmoid colon, and so on. Over the crotch—cut in half because the coat is open—is the familiar logo of the erection drug Propulsatil.

  “That’s an amazing coat,” I say. The guy looks at me, trying to decide whether I’m being sarcastic, but I don’t know myself, so he can’t tell.

  So he just says, “Are you the Medicine team?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Dr. Friendly.”

  Great. I wouldn’t trust this guy to work on my car.

  “I’m taking this patient to the OR this morning,” he says. “Make sure he’s ready.”

  “He is ready,” I say. “He doesn’t want a DNR.”

  Dr. Friendly drops a hand on my shoulder. Nice manicure, at least. “Of course he doesn’t,” he says. “And don’t kiss my ass. I get enough of that from my resident.”

  I just look at him.

  “If I need to talk to you, I’ll have you paged,” he says.

  I try to think of an excuse to stay, but I can’t. I’m distracted— first by the fact that Dr. Friendly’s coat has Marinir patches over the kidneys when he turns his back on me, and then by the smell of his resident.

  Which, suddenly, I recognize. The resident’s dark-circled, bloodshot eyes stare back at me as I turn.

  “Surgery ghost?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks for letting me sleep.” His breath is still utterly rank.

  I turn back to Squillante as I leave. “Try to stay alive till I get back,” I say.

  As I leave the Anadale Wing there’s a high-pitched whine in my left ear.

  I try to imagine what Prof. Marmoset—the Great One— would tell me to do. I ask him, almost out loud: Professor Marmoset!!! What the fuck should I do???

  I imagine him shaking his head. Beats the fuck out of me, Ishmael.*

  Fuck it. I pull out my cell phone. Say “Marmoset” into it and press “dial.”

  A nurse walking past me says “You can’t use a cell p
hone in here.”

  “Yeah,” I say to her.

  On the phone, a ridiculously breathy and sexual female voice says, “Hi. I’m Firefly, the automated answering service. For whom are you looking?” It’s like speech from a vagina.

  “Marmoset.”

  “Professor Marmoset is not answering his phone right now. Would you like me to go look for him?”

  “Yes,” I tell the fucking thing.

  “Please state your name.”

  “Ishmael.”

  “One moment, please,” Firefly says. “Would you like music while you wait?”

  “Eat shit,” I say.

  But the joke’s on me. A song by Sting comes on.

  “I was unable to locate him,” Firefly finally says. “Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Yes,” I say, fighting tears of bitterness at having to converse with this monstrosity.

  “You’re welcome. You may begin your message now.”

  “Professor Marmoset—” I begin. There’s a beep.

  Then silence. I wait for a few seconds. Nothing happens.

  “Professor Marmoset,” I say. “It just beeped. I don’t know if that means it just started recording or that it stopped recording. It’s Ishmael. I really need to talk to you. Please call me or page me.”

  I leave both numbers, even though I have to read the one for my cell phone off the name tag on my stethoscope. I can’t remember the last time I gave it out to anyone.

  Then I consider trying to call Sam Freed, who brought me into WITSEC in the first place. Freed’s retired, though, and I have no idea how to reach him. And I am nowhere near ready to talk to whoever’s doing his job now.

  When my pager goes off again, I look at it in case it’s Marmoset. But it’s just an alphanumeric reminder that, as bad as things are, they can always get worse:

  “WHERE R U? ATTNDG RNDS IF NOT COEM NOW U R FIRED.”

  Even on a good day I would prefer talking to an insurance company employee to having to sit through Attending Rounds. Now, when some fuckhead I haven’t even thought about in years has a good shot at getting me either killed or back on the run, it’s galling.

  Because, COEM NOW or not, odds are I am FCKD.

  6

  Here’s a fun thing to do next time you’re in Sicily: Get the fuck out. Run.

  The place has been a shithole since the Romans burned its forests and razed its hills so they could have a wheat farm near the Italian peninsula but too far off shore for the locusts to reach it. Even Garibaldi’s Redshirts, when they liberated Italy, left Sicily in chains. It was too valuable to give up.

  The Sicilians themselves, over the centuries, got compacted into three distinct classes. There were the serfs, about whom what can you say, really. There were the landowners, who had mansions on the island but visited as seldom as possible. And there were the overseers—a leech class who, if they kept production up, were allowed to do anything to the serfs they wanted to.

  The overseers lived in the owners’ mansions when the owners were away. During the Ottoman years they were called mayvah, which meant “swaggerers.” The word later became mafia.

  When Sicilians began to immigrate to the U.S. in the early twentieth century, mostly to work picking paper out of the trash on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the mafia followed to keep sucking their blood. During Prohibition the mob did something arguably socially useful, but when that ended they returned to blackmailing people with the threat of violence full-time. A Roman history fetishist named Sal “Little Caesar” Manzaro even started a private army, using Italianized Roman rank names like capodecini and consiglieri, and life in New York got so bad the Feds finally became interested. The only thing that saved the mafia at that point was the garbage business.

  For reasons that remain unclear, but probably have to do with it being easier for private companies than public ones to illegally dump trash across state lines, in 1957 New York City stopped collecting garbage for commercial businesses. Stopped for every commercial business, overnight. For the first time in a hundred years. Suddenly every company in the city was in the export business, with a massive, rotting product that could only be moved with trucks.

  The mafia knew trucks from the paper-hauling days, and liked them. Trucks are slow and easy to find, and their crews are small and easy to fuck up. By the mid-1960s the mob routinely had the garbage workers’ unions, which it controlled, go on strike against the garbage companies, which it owned, then watched as the mayor jumped to raise collection rates to stop the resulting rat and disease epidemic.

  This happened into the 1990s. You hear a lot about Armani suits, and “Dapper Dons,” and respect, and how Ha-ha, Tony Soprano pretends to be in the garbage business and so on, but for years it was garbage that kept the Five Families alive. Drugs, murder, hookers—even gambling, before the Indian thing—were just sidelines.

  Eventually, though, Rudy Giuliani decided enough was enough and brought in Waste Management, a multinational corporation so scary it made the mafia look like little girls in those competitions JonBenet Ramsey used to enter. Waste Management’s own crimes were severe enough to ultimately force changes in the SEC, among other things, but its appearance on the New York garbage scene inspired another round of funeral announcements for the mafia.

  Once again, though, the actual death was averted by legislation. This time at the state level.

  For a number of years the mob had been running a scam where they opened gas stations using dummy owners, then closed them when the state tax bill came due. Since the state tax was over twenty-five cents a gallon, this meant they were able to drive every honest competitor out of business, which was lucrative but involved a lot of downtime, since each gas station had to stay closed for a minimum of three months between bankruptcies. Then the state changed the law, requiring gasoline wholesalers instead of retailers to pay the gas tax.

  The idea was to kill the Gas Tax Scam, but the result was the much more lucrative New Gas Tax Scam—which, if you believe it, was invented by Lawrence Iorizzo and the Russian mobster “Little” Igor Roizman simultaneously, like Newton and Leibniz inventing the calculus.

  In the New Gas Tax Scam you opened and closed sham wholesalers, and kept the gas stations open all year round, which was a bonanza. It sounds obvious and ridiculous, but by the end of 1995 the Sicilians and the Russians had used it to steal a combined four hundred million dollars from New York and New Jersey alone.

  Ultimately, though, for the Sicilians to be in the same business as the Russians was a very bad idea. The Sicilians, after two thousand years of jackal vs. carrion culture, had become as lazy as the British, with the same dreams of living in a castle and being waited on by serfs. The Russians, who had recently had every illusion about organized society stripped from them, may have wanted the same thing, but they were willing to work their asses off for it.

  You could see where this was headed. The Russians would eventually own the New Gas Tax Scam, just as they would own Coney Island, another disputed possession. It was only a question of when, how smoothly, and how profitably for the Sicilians.

  Those Sicilians who saw things clearly realized that sooner was better, since a negotiated retreat while they still had power left from the garbage years was preferable to a rout.

  Those Sicilians who failed to understand this, though, had a harder time saying goodbye, and caused problems. And the Russians had their own share of troublemakers. So as the sale of organized crime in New York worked its way to completion, there were always corners needing to be smoothed.

  Smoothing out the corners was David Locano’s job.

  I finished out my junior year of high school expecting to be arrested for the murder of the Virzi brothers. That was part of the reason I decided not to go to college, although more of it was just laziness. The way I saw it, I was too old and worldly to sit around a dorm room reading Faulkner while some dipshit played acoustic guitar. And while I knew that stopping my education would have scandalized my gra
ndparents, I was also aware, constantly, that they weren’t around to feel scandalized by anything anymore.

  I took a very brief break from the Locanos. I didn’t go with them to Aruba, for example, though I wanted to, and I stayed at my grandparents’ house while they were gone. And I made other brief and weak attempts to examine and justify continuing to spend time with them.

  For example, once when Skinflick and I were high I asked him if he was planning to join the mafia himself. We were walking to Jack in the Box, since Skinflick and I both had an easy susceptibility to what potheads call “the munchies.”*

  “No fuckin way, dude,” he said. “And even if I wanted to, my father would kill me.”

  “Huh,” I said. “By the way, who did your father kill to get into the mafia?”

  “No one. He got a dispensation cause he was a lawyer.”

  “You believe that?”

  He belched. “Absolutely. The guy doesn’t lie to me.”

  Skinflick did seem to have an incredibly smooth relationship with his father, although the one book he claimed he’d ever read in its entirety was The Golden Bough, by James Fraser. Which, aside from being a weird choice for the only book you’ve ever read, is essentially about patricide, and how the origins of civilization lie in intergenerational struggle. The golden bough is what young slaves in a primitive society Fraser discusses pluck when they want to challenge the king to a duel to the death, with the winner keeping the crown.

  Skinflick denied that this showed any hostility toward his father, though. He said he’d only picked up The Golden Bough because Kurtz is reading it in Apocalypse Now, and had stuck with it because its ideas about freedom and modernity appealed to him.

  “For instance,” he once said, coincidentally while he and I were riding with his father in his father’s car, “people are always bitching about how their primitive fight-or-flight instincts are being repressed, and how they’re depressed because of it. But I can shoot a shotgun while I’m driving down the freeway. No one in history has been that free.”

  “You can’t shoot a shotgun standing still,” his father said.