Calahan's Con Part 6

"Oh." She had a point. Mickey Finn's Filarii technology-or "magic," if you prefer-is highly selective. Of course, you'd want it to be. It wouldn't be much good if it simply coated you in invisible plastic: How could somebody kiss you? Mickey explained to us once that it's calibrated to stop only lethal force. Don't ask me how it can tell, instantly, whether an incoming missile is going to be fatal or not: Mick did explain it, but none of us understood what he said. The point is, you can shoot me with anything from a bow and arrow to a bazooka, or bomb me with anything from a grenade to a nuke, or hit me with anything from a crowbar to a broadsword, without necessarily capturing my attention, if I happen to be working on an especially interesting crossword puzzle at the time. But if you decide to punch me in the mouth, I'm probably going to lose some teeth.

I knew for a fact I had nothing to fear from atomic weapons. Yet there was an excellent chance that a monster like Little Nuts could hospitalize or kill me with his hands, as long as no single blow was deadly in itself. And even if I owned a gun of sufficiently authoritative caliber to annoy him back, I wouldn't dare use it in any but the most dire emergency. It may be a little hard for you to believe, especially if you live in an American city, but in Key West gunplay is considered bad form.

"Well," I said, "when in doubt, consult an expert."

Zoey grimaced. "Terrific. Who's an expert on exterminating mastodons?"

"Hmm," Long-Drink said. "The definition of expert is, 'an ordinary person, a long way from home.' An ordinary person, far from home, who knows about monsters and how to kill them without getting into the papers ..."

He and I and Doc Webster and Fast Eddie all said it at once: "Bert!"

Bert D'Ambrosio, aka "Bert the Shirt," is believed to be the only man who was ever allowed to retire from the Mafia.

He was well past middle age, on his way up the courthouse steps in Brooklyn to not-testify in some now-forgotten trial or other, when he had a heart attack and died. The medics managed to get him rebooted within a matter of minutes . . . but as soon as he was back on his feet, he went to see his Don. Look, he said, I died for you: Can I go now? The G.o.dfather must have liked him. After some thought, he told Bert to go keep an eye on the family's interests in Key West.

This was Mafia humor, because there are no family interests in Key West, because who in his right mind would bother exploiting an end-of-the-world rat hole and college-student vomitorium the size of a New York City park, with a speed limit of thirty, way more bicycles than cars, and only one road in or out? Bert thanked Don Vincente and retired to southernmost Florida. Today he's edging into his eighties, and I confidently expect him to dance at my funeral. And the ridiculous thing is, he's still as connected as he ever was, in a quiet sort of way. Somehow, he manages to stay in touch, keep plugged in. He sits there in the sun, in his splendid silk and linen shirts, and people come along and tell him things. Specifically because there is no action here, nothing to get killed over, Guys From The Old Neighborhood (as Bert always calls them) will come through on vacation, from time to time. They say the Don himself actually visited once, before my time.

So Bert seemed the ideal choice for an expert consultant in the matter of how to deal with an extra-large psychotic extortionist without the neighbors noticing.

For some reason, Erin was nowhere to be found. I left the bar in Tom Hauptman's capable hands, and Zoey and I saddled up and pedaled over to the Paradiso Condos on Smathers Beach. At his age, Bert the Shirt doesn't come to you; you go to him. In fact, I seldom approach Bert these days without reflecting how extraordinary it is that you still can approach him without first floating down a tunnel toward a very bright light.

We found him where we expected to, sitting in a lounge chair under an umbrella, watching the zoo parade of beach people across the street. Under the chair, in the small pool of shade it and Bert's bony flanks afforded, lay what looked like a heap of bread dough that hadn't risen very well, except that it pulsed in slow rhythm. As we came near, it rose slightly at one end and emitted a sustained baritone fart that any camel would have been proud to claim. Bert leaned sideways slightly and glowered down at it.

"Hi, Bert. Hi, Don Giovanni," Zoey said happily.

The object under the chair lifted its other end enough to reveal a face, and turned it up toward the sound of Zoey's voice. The face made Bert's look young. Well, younger. Both eyes were so heavily cataracted they looked more like immies than eyes. There were about four surviving whiskers, randomly placed. The nose was the only part of him still capable of running. Basically Don Giovanni is one of the very few blind dogs to have a seeing-eye human.

"Hey, kiddo," Bert said to Zoey with real pleasure. "Whadda ya say?" He nodded politely enough to me, but it was clearly my wife's appearance that had made his day. She gets that a lot. Today the shirt was midnight blue silk, a wide-collar thing with an almost liquid sheen and real ivory b.u.t.tons, an impressive garment even by Bert's standards. As usual, it and his pants were covered with a fine mist of white hairs the length of eyelashes; nonetheless he was almost certainly the snazziest-dressed man in Key West, that or any other day.

"It's time to move him," Zoey replied.

Bert grimaced and nodded fatalistically. Without looking down, he reached under the lounger and tugged Don Giovanni a few inches, until the dog was once again completely in the shade. Don Giovanni shuddered briefly in what might have been grat.i.tude or merely relief, and became completely inert once more. "I'm his personal ozone layer. I never laid anybody from Ozone Park in my life. h.e.l.lo, Zoey; hiya, Jake-what brings ya all around to this side a the rock?"

"Trouble," Zoey replied, pulling another lounger up alongside his and sitting down. I did the same on the other side, and Erin sat on the edge of my lounger.

Bert nodded again, even more fatalistically. "Everybody could use a little ozone. What'sa beef?"

Zoey looked at me. Discussing homicidal psychopaths with a representative of the Mafia was the husband's job. "Ever hear of a traveling mountain range called Donnazzio?" I asked.

Bert sat up straighter so suddenly that the lounger bounced. Somehow Don Giovanni bounced the same amount at the same instant, so the lounger's feet failed to come down on him anywhere. "Tony Donuts's kid, ya mean? Tony Junior. Little Nuts, they call him. He's your trouble?"

So the kid's name really was the same as his dad's. "Yah."

When a serious man like Bert, who usually looks solemn oven when he's having fun, suddenly looks grave, the effect is striking, and a little demoralizing. He looked away from me, sent his gaze out across the Atlantic, and frowned at Portugal. I bet it flinched.

"Ya got a beef with Little Nuts," he said, "my advice is ta shoot yourself right now. Try and run, you'll just die tired." "Neither one is an option, Bert."

He snorted. "Right, I forgot. You guys don't get shot. You wanna keep somethin' like that quiet. CIA hears about it, you're up s.h.i.t creek. Okay, ya better explaina situation ta me."

So we did. It took longer than if one person had done it, but not twice as long. Quite. In no time Bert had grokked the essentials.

"So ya can't kill this bastid, and ya don't even want him to figure out he can't kill you."

"That's basically it," I agreed. "Either one would be liable to cause talk."

Bert nodded. "We don't want no more a that in the world than necessary. Okay, gimme a minute." He sat back in his lounger, aimed his face at the horizon, and closed his eyes.

Zoey and I exchanged a glance.

Finally he opened his eyes, studied the horizon a moment, and nodded. "Okay," he said, "It's risky, but at least it's a shot." We displayed respectful attentiveness.

"Ya can't take him out, ya can't drop a dime on him, an ya can't let him attack ya. So there's only one thing left ya can do." "What, Bert?" Zoey asked.

"You're gonna have to con him, dear."

My wife and I smiled.

"We got some people who are pretty good at that," Zoey a.s.sured him.

"Really?"

She nodded. "World cla.s.s."

Bert nodded. "That's gotta help."

"I don't know," I said dubiously. "Their experience has mostly been in conning humans. How do you con a gorilla?"

"Same way ya con a chimp," Bert said, "or a college professor. Ya figure out what he wants bad, and then sell him somethin' that smells just like it."

"That's what I mean," I said. "What Tony Donuts Junior wants bad is everything."

Bert shook his head. "Don't matter. Lotta guys want everythin'. I known a few in my day. But there's always some one thing they want most."

"So how are we going to find out what Tony Junior wants most?" Zoey asked.

"Oh, I know, kid," Bert told her. "Everybody does."

"You do?"

"Sure. He wants a b.u.t.ton."

"Huh?"

"He wants to get made. Tony Junior wants ta be a wise guy. Common knowledge."

I was skeptical. "Are you sure, Bert? The way I hear it, the Donnazzio family and the Mafia have always given each other a wide berth. I mean, I met the guy. He's not just a loose cannon; he's a loose nuclear weapon."

"No argument," Bert said, holding up his hands. "I'm not talkin' what he's gonna get, I'm talkin' what he wants. Real bad. I think it's a way ta, like, succeed where his old man couldn't."

Zoey was frowning. "I don't see how this helps us. We can't sell him a counterfeit mob membership card."

Bert's hands were still held up; he turned them both around in a "beats me" gesture. "I'm just tellin' ya what he wants most. He talked ta me about it one time, like soundin' me out. I hadda tell him I didn't see it happenin'. He wants ta know, what if he put a couple mil on the table? I told him it ain't money; any a.s.shole in a suit can bring in money. Ta be made, from the outside . . . I ain't sayin' it never happened. But it'd take something special."

"Like what?" I asked.

"I dunno. Somethin' different. Outa the ordinary, like. Bringin' in a new territory . . . takin' out a whole police department . . . dreamin' up some new racket . . . somethin' flashy like that. And it's hard to picture Tony Junior pullin' off somethin' that impressive."

Zoey said, "A new territory, you said? How about Key West?"

Bert shook his head. "Nah. f.u.c.k's heah?"

Zoey shrugged with her eyebrows, conceding the point. "Then I don't get it. How is shaking down bars in Key West supposed to help get Little Nuts a b.u.t.ton?"

Bert spread his spotted hands. "Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?"

The four of us sat for a silent while together and watched the sea, the sky, and all the sweating, swarming people in the way. Key West is people-watching paradise. You get to see them temporarily freed of nearly all the inhibitions that help define them back home up north, to see them with their wrapper off, so to speak. Well, most of it-despite the lateness of the hour, the sun was so intense today that even drunken college kids slathered with Factor 100 sunblock had had sense enough to put at least a T-shirt on. The sun was dropping fast, though; it was almost time to think about where to watch the sunset from.

"I got a teary," Bert said suddenly.

Teary? "A sad story, you mean?"

"No. A teary."

When I failed to respond, he glanced at me and realized I was clueless. "A guess that's been to college. Some guy in a white coat makes a guess,' he don't wanna admit it's just a guess, so he calls it a teary."

Light dawned. "Of course. Sorry, I didn't hear you right at first. So what's your theory?"

"It just come to me. Maybe there is a new territory here. It ties in with somethin' I been thinkin' about for a long time-that everybody's been thinkin' about for a long time. Ask yourself: What's the strangest thing in Key West these days?

"The T-shirt shops on Duval," Zoey and I said simultaneously.

"f.u.c.kin' A," Bert said. Beneath him, Don Giovanni gently farted, possibly in agreement.

Duval Street is the heart of Key West's tourist crawl, over a dozen blocks of road-company French Quarter, and as recently as five years ago, it was still a lively, diverse, eclectic mix of bars, galleries, bars, studios, bars, food outlets, taverns, and shops of every conceivable kind, hawking everything from aardvark-hide upholstery to zabaglione. Then at some point n.o.body has ever been able to pin down, for reasons no one could explain, it all began to change. Today the bars are pretty much all still there . . . but of the other commercial enterprises on the street, more than half are T shirt shops now.

We Key West locals have all been trying to make sense of it for a long time, without success It just doesn't seem reason able that there could possibly be enough business to support so many competing enterprises with such a narrow product line. Surely when tourists pack to come here, they bring T-shirts?

Yet there the T-shirt shops age-a couple dozen of them. None of them ever seems to have much in the way of customers inside, when you pa.s.s by them, but somehow none ever seems to go broke. Even stranger, they seldom put up signs claiming to be about to go broke. As far as anyone has ever been able to learn, they mostly seem to be owned by anonymous distant corporations. They're usually managed and staffed by hired transients, with a turnover rate rivaling raw combat troops in a jungle war.

"I spent a little time and money at City Hall," Bert told us, "and got a list a who owns 'em all. Turns out mostly it's companies where the name is just initials anna address is a post office box. So last night I made a call ta Miami, an' got a readin' on who pays for the post office boxes. Come ta find out, it's a buncha different guys, all over the world . . . but they all got one thing in common, sticks right out." As an excuse to pause for effect, he leaned down and tugged Don Giovanni fully back into shade again.

"And that is?" Zoey prompted impatiently.

"Skis and coughs."

Zoey and I exchanged a glance.

"Alla names ended in ski or cough," Bert explained. "Like Tufs.h.i.tski or Yuhi Chakakov."

"Russians? All of them?"

"d.a.m.n near."

That was odd. Why would so many expatriates of the late Soviet Socialist Republic all pick the same eccentric capitalist trade, and all end up in Key West-on the same street? It was as puzzling as how they all managed to earn a living.

Bert said nothing now.

I closed my eyes and thought. But Zoey got there before I did. "Bert-are you telling us the Russian Mafia has been turning Duval Street into a giant money laundry?"

"Vaffanculo!" I exclaimed involuntarily.

"Dis is my teary," he agreed. "I had my suspicions for a while now, but I think the skis an' coughs nails it down."

"Think about it, Jake," Zoey said. "It makes a lot of sense. If you were a Russian gangster, a rat fleeing the sinking country, and you wanted to get a toehold in the U.S., where wouldyou start? Someplace American gangsters won't notice you, right? Somewhere that isn't anybody's turf, so you aren't cutting into anybody else's action. Someplace where n.o.body's liable to notice you, because everybody else around is so weird or so drunk, you can't possibly stand out. How many places like that are there?"

Bert smiled fondly at her. "What a consigliere you woulda made, kid."

Zoey smiled back at him, then sobered. "Speaking of which, you haven't pa.s.sed your suspicions . . . well, back up the chain of command yet, have you Bert?"

Bert sighed. "I been gettin' ready ta," he said. "But once I get on the horn ta Miami, either I'm wrong an' I look like an a.s.shole ... or I'm right, an' a war starts. Here. In Key West." He spread his hands and shrugged. "There didn't seem ta be any rush."

I was beginning to see metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel. "So Little Nuts-"

"-maybe figures if he can roll up the Russkis and deliver them and their action to Chollie Ponte up in Miami, before Chollie even figures out they're here, maybe it earns Tony junior a b.u.t.ton."

"And he starts out by-"

"-by rollin' up all the little joints on either side a Duval, first. Like you guys. He's encirclin the bastids, get it? Standard strategy; lock up the neighborhood, from the outside in. Then when he finally squeezes them, the Russkis got no place ta go. They're surrounded."

Bert's teary made a certain twisted sense. It would be easy enough to check with neighboring businesses and find out which of them had also been visited by Little Nuts recently.

Zoey was shaking her head and groaning. "This is not good news, Bert. Basically what you're saying is, we're not merely being shaken down by the Son of Kong, we're actually at ground zero of an impending international gang war." Bert pursed his lips. "Yeah."

"This is sounding less and less like something we can keep quiet."

He nodded. "Yeah, it is."

"What would you do if you were me, Bert?" I asked him. "You said ya had a couple of players in your crew, right? Put them to work on it."

There are two reasons why Bert survived as long as he did in a dangerous occupation, and only one of them is luck.