Jeffery Deaver: Garden Of Beasts

Bull Gordon didn’t laugh. “You’re in Dutch, Paul, and you can’t beat the rap. So here’s what we’re offering. Like they say in those used-Studebaker ads: this’s a one-time-only offer. Take it or leave it. We don’t negotiate.”

The Senator finally spoke. “Tom Dewey wants you as bad as he wants the rest of the scum on his list.”

The special prosecutor was on a divine mission to clean up organized crime in New York. Crime boss Lucky Luciano, the Italian Five Families in the city and the Jewish syndicate of Meyer Lansky were his main targets. Dewey was dogged and smart and he was winning conviction after conviction.

“But he’s agreed to give us first dibs on you.”

“Forget it. I’m not a stool pigeon.”

Gordon said, “We’re not asking you to be one. That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

A pause for a moment. The Senator nodded toward Gordon, who said, “You’re a button man, Paul. What do you think? We want you to kill somebody.”

He held Gordon’s eyes for a moment then he looked at the pictures of the ships on the wall. The Room… It had a military feel to it. Like an officers’ club. Paul had liked his time in the army. He’d felt at home there, had friends, had a purpose. That was a good time for him, a simple time – before he came back home and life got complicated. When life gets complicated, bad things can happen.

“You’re being square with me?”

“Oh, you bet.”

With Manielli squinting out a warning to move slowly, Paul reached into his pocket and took out a pack of Chesterfields. He lit one. “Go on.”

Gordon said, “You’ve got that gym over on Ninth Avenue. Not much of a place, is it?” He asked this of Avery.

“You been there?” Paul asked.

Avery said, “Not so swank.”

Manielli laughed. “Real dive, I’d say.”

The commander continued, “But you used to be a printer before you got into this line of work. You liked the printing business, Paul?”

Cautiously Paul said, “Yeah.”

“Were you good at it?”

“Yeah, I was good. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

“How’d you like to make your whole past go away. Start over. Be a printer again. We can fix it so nobody can prosecute you for anything you’ve done in the past.”

“And,” the Senator added, “we’ll cough up some bucks too. Five thousand. You can get a new life.”

Five thousand? Paul blinked. It took most joes two years to earn that kind of money. He asked, “How can you clean up my record?”

The Senator laughed. “You know that new game, Monopoly? You ever play it?”

“My nephews have it. I never played.”

The Senator continued. “Sometimes when you roll the dice you end up in prison. But there’s this card that says ‘Get Out of Jail Free.’ Well, we’ll give you one for real. That’s all you need to know.”

“You want me to kill somebody? That’s queer. Dewey’d never agree to it.”

The Senator said, “The special prosecutor hasn’t been informed about why we want you.”

After a pause he asked, “Who? Siegel?” Of all the current mobsters Bugsy Siegel was the most dangerous. Psychotic, really. Paul had seen the bloody results of the man’s brutality. His tantrums were legendary.

“Now, Paul,” Gordon said, disdain on his face, “it’d be illegal for you to kill a U.S. citizen. We’d never ask you to do anything like that.”

“Then I don’t get the angle.”

The Senator said, “This is more like a wartime situation. You were a soldier…” A glance at Avery, who recited, “First Infantry Division, First American Army, AEF. St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne. You did some serious fighting. Got yourself some medals for marksmanship in the field. Did some hand-to-hand too, right?”

Paul shrugged. The fat man in the wrinkled white suit sat silently in his corner, hands clasped on the gold handle of his walking stick. Paul held his eye for a minute. Then turned back to the commander. “What’re the odds I’ll survive long enough to use my get-out-of-jail card?”

“Reasonable,” the commander said. “Not great but reasonable.”

Paul was a friend of the sports journalist and writer Damon Runyon. They’d drink together some in the dives near Broadway, go to fights and ball games. A couple of years ago Runyon had invited Paul to a party after the New York opening of his movie Little Miss Marker, which Paul thought was a pretty good flick. At the party afterward, where he got a kick out of meeting Shirley Temple, he’d asked Runyon to autograph a book. The writer had inscribed it, To my pal, Paul – Remember, all of life is six to five against.

Avery said, “How ’bout we just say your chances’re a lot better than if you go to Sing Sing.”

After a moment Paul asked, “Why me? You’ve got dozens of button men in New York ’d be willing to do it for that kind of scratch.”

“Ah, but you’re different, Paul. You’re not a two-bit punk. You’re good. Hoover and Dewey say you’ve killed seventeen men.”

Paul scoffed. “Bum wire, I keep saying.”

In fact, the number was thirteen.

“What we’ve heard about you is that you check everything two, three times before the job. You make sure your guns’re in perfect shape, you read up about your victims, you look over their places ahead of time, you find their schedule and you make sure they stick to it, you know when they’ll be alone, when they make phone calls, where they eat.”

The Senator added, “And you’re smart. Like I was saying. We need smart for this.”

“Smart?”

Manielli said, “We been to your place, Paul. You got books. Damn, you got a lot of books. You’re even in the Book of the Month Club.”

“They’re not smart books. Not all of ’em.”

“But they are books,” Avery pointed out. “And I’m betting a lot of people in your business don’t read much.”

“Or can’t read,” Manielli said and laughed at his own joke.

Paul looked over at the man in the wrinkled white suit. “Who’re you?”

“You don’t need to worry-” Gordon began.

“I’m asking him.”

“Listen,” the Senator grumbled, “we’re calling the shots, my friend.”

But the fat man waved his hand and then replied to Paul, “You know the comics? Little Orphan Annie, the girl without the pupils in her eyes?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well, think of me as Daddy Warbucks.”

“What’s that mean?”

But he just laughed and turned to the Senator. “Keep pitching your case. I like him.”

The rail-thin politician said to Paul, “Most important, you don’t kill anybody innocent.”

Gordon added, “Jimmy Coughlin told us you said one time that you only kill other killers. What’d you say? That you only ‘correct God’s mistakes’? That’s what we need.”

“God’s mistakes,” the Senator repeated, smiling in lip but not in spirit.

“Well, who is it?”

Gordon looked at the Senator, who deflected the question. “You have relatives in Germany still?”

“Nobody close. My family came over here a long time ago.”

The Senator asked, “What do you know about the Nazis?”

“Adolf Hitler’s running the country. Sounds like nobody’s really crazy about it. There was this big rally against him at Madison Square Garden in March, two, three years ago. Traffic was a swell mess, I’ll tell you. I missed the first three rounds of a fight up in the Bronx. Got under my skin… That’s about it.”

“Did you know, Paul,” the Senator said slowly, “that Hitler’s planning another war?”