John Hart - Iron House

Michael didn’t blame him.

He had the cabbie drive by the residence, then stop a full block north, near the defunct Sixtieth Street heliport. The space was a dog run now, and when Michael stepped from the cab he saw well-dressed women chatting while small dogs played. One of the women saw him and said something to her friends, so that all three turned as Michael paid off the cab. Michael nodded, then turned to walk twice past the house, once moving south, then coming back north. A portico drive led to private parking in the back. When he stopped before the door, he stood with his palms up, eyes moving between the security cameras mounted at the corners and above the main door. Someone moved behind a third-floor window. Curtains stirred at the ground level, too.

Eventually, Michael knocked, and after a long minute the door swung open to reveal four men. Two were low-level soldiers whose names Michael had never bothered to learn. In their twenties, they wore dark pants and shirts that shone like silk under their suit jackets. One chewed gum, and both stood with fingers inside their coats, as if Michael needed to be told they carried. Under slicked hair their faces were lean and frightened. They’d heard stories of Michael, of the things he’d done. He was a fighter and a killer, a prince of the street so widely feared he rarely had to kill anymore. His presence alone was sufficient. His name. The threat of his name.

The third man was a stranger, young and calm and lean, but the fourth, Michael knew well.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

Jimmy stood an inch taller than Michael, but weighed thirty pounds less, narrow-shouldered and thin to the point of desiccation. Dapper in bottle-green pants and a brushed velvet coat, he was forty-eight years old, balding on top and vain enough to care. Michael knew from long acquaintance that his arms and chest carried more than a dozen scars. Knife wounds. Bite marks. Bullet holes. Eighteen years ago, he’d shown Michael things that would make a grown man faint. Michael was fifteen years old at the time, hard but not cruel; and Jimmy was all about cruel. He was about message and fear, a hard-core, brutal sadist who even now was the most dangerous man Michael had ever known.

“May I come in?” Michael asked.

“I’m thinking.”

“Well, think faster.”

Jimmy was a complicated man, equal parts appetite, ego, and self-preservation. He respected Michael, but didn’t like him. Jimmy was a butcher, Michael a surgeon. The difference caused problems. It was an ego thing. Matters of principle.

Their gazes held for long seconds, then Jimmy said, “Whatever.”

He moved back a pace and Michael stepped into the dim interior. The entry hall was massive, with white and black marble floors and a red-carpeted stairway that curved up both sides of the room before meeting on a landing twelve feet higher. A billiards room filled the space to Michael’s right, and he could see through into the formal parlor, the small study beyond. He sensed movement deeper in the house, saw food on a long table, other men, other guns, and Michael knew then that they were marking time, waiting in stillness for the old man to die.

“I’d like to see him, Jimmy.”

“He can’t save you.”

“No one’s asking.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Michael. All these years, all the things you’ve been given. Opportunity. Skills. Respect. You were nothing when we found you.”

“You don’t have the right to feel that way, Jimmy.”

“I have every right.”

He was angry and barely hiding it. Michael tilted his head to see the men behind him, then looked back at Jimmy. “The opportunity came from the old man, not you; the respect I earned on my own. Some of the skills may have started with you, but that’s all it was, a start. I’ve made my own way since then.”

“And yet, I helped choose you.”

“For good reasons.”

“Are you really so arrogant?”

“Are you?”

The silence held until Jimmy blinked. Michael said, “I want to see him.”

“Do you still think you have that right?”

“Step back, Jimmy.”

Jimmy shrugged, half-smiling, then moved back and allowed Michael to enter all the way. In the light of the chandelier, Michael saw how wired Jimmy looked, how taut. His dark eyes pulled in light, and there was emptiness there, the same vacuum-behind-glass look Michael had seen so many times. It was the look he got before people died.

“The old man released me, Jimmy. He gave standing orders that I was to be left alone. I’d say I still have the right to see him.”

Jimmy blinked, and the look faded. “Tell Stevan that.”

Stevan was thirty-six years old, with degrees from Columbia and Harvard, not because he cared about the education, but because he craved respectability in a city that knew his name too well. The old man’s only son, he and Michael had been friends once-brothers-but that bridge was burnt to smoke and ruin. Eight days had passed since Michael quit the life. One week and a day. A world of change.

“How is my brother?” Michael masked the rage with sarcasm. Stevan drove a black Audi, and Michael knew for a fact that he kept a twenty-five in the glove compartment.

“How’s Stevan?” Jimmy mimicked the question, rolling the words on his tongue as if tasting them. “His brother’s a traitor and his father is dying. How do you think he is?”

“I think he’s making mistakes.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“Where was he at five o’clock this morning?”

Jimmy rolled his shoulders, turned his lips down. “Stevan has offered to forgive you, Michael-how many times, now? Three times? Four? All you have to do is repent. Come back to us.”

“Things have changed. I want out.”

“Then you leave him no choice.”

Michael pictured the bullet holes in the door of Chez Pascal. Two double-taps. Head height. “Nothing personal, right?”

“Exactly.”

“And the wishes of his father? The man who built this from nothing? Who built you from nothing? What about him?”

“The son is not the father.”

A moment’s irony touched his eyes. At fifteen, the old man had made Michael Jimmy’s student, and in that capacity he became a mirror to Jimmy’s vanity, something Jimmy could point to and say, “Look at this instrument I’ve made.” The old man’s business had thrived with the two of them on the street, for as effective as Jimmy had been by himself, it was nothing compared to what they’d done together. They’d killed their way from one river to the other, north to south and over into Jersey. Russian mob. Serbians. Italians. It didn’t matter. If somebody crossed the old man, they took him down. But after all these years, that’s all Michael was to Jimmy, a weapon.

Disposable.

Michael looked from Jimmy to the man he’d never met. He stood three feet behind Jimmy’s right shoulder, a spare man in linen pants and a golf shirt tight enough to show straps of lean, hard muscle. “Who’s he?” Michael asked.

“Your replacement.”

Michael felt a pang that was neither loss nor hurt, but one more broken strand. He looked the man over and noticed small things he’d missed. Fine white scars on both forearms, one finger that lacked a nail. The man stood six feet tall, and looked vaguely Slavic, with wide-spaced eyes and broad planes of cheekbone. Michael shrugged once, and then dismissed him. “I would never turn on people who trust me,” he said to Jimmy.

“No? How long have you been with this woman of yours? Three months? A year?”

“What does it matter? It’s personal.”

“It matters because you only told us about her eight days ago. You kept her a secret, and keeping secrets from us is one step away from spilling ours. It’s two sides of the same coin. Secrets. Lack of trust. Priorities.”