William Lashner - Bitter Truth

She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “Trust me, Victor, it’s no easy thing being born rich.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s hard work, but the pay is great.”

“You don’t know.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Come to France with me.”

“What about the lawsuit?”

“Screw the lawsuit.”

“We’re so close to figuring it out.”

“Is that what it’s all been about? The lawsuit? Is everything we’ve gone through together just that?”

I glanced at her cool face in the green glow of the dashboard’s light. What I noticed just then was how childlike she was. “I like you, Caroline, I care for you and I worry about you, but neither of us ever had any illusions.”

After ten minutes of silence, which is a heavy load of silence, she simply said, “I have some things to pick up at your place, Victor, and then, please, just take me home.”

I parked on Spruce, not far from my apartment. I took my pack from the car and Caroline and I walked together up the dark street. In the vestibule, while I was unlocking the front door, I sniffed and raised my head and sniffed again.

“Do you smell that?”

“It smells like a garbage dump on fire,” she said.

Acrid, and deep, like the foul odor of burning tires. I opened the door and stepped inside. The smell grew.

“What is that?” I said. “It’s like someone forgot to turn off a stovetop.”

As we climbed the stairs the stench worsened. It was strongest outside my door. I went on a bit and sniffed the next doorway.

“Dammit, it’s my apartment.”

With fumbling fingers I tried unsuccessfully to jam the key into my lock, tried again, finally got it in, twisted hard. I felt the bolt slide. I grabbed the knob, turned it, and threw open the door. Smoke billowed, with a fetor that turned my stomach. I flicked on the light. The air was hazy with the noxious smoke and through the haze I could see that my apartment had been trashed, tables overturned, a bureau emptied, cushions from the couch thrown about. I dropped my pack upon the mess and rushed around the room’s bend to search for the fire in the kitchen. When I made it halfway through the living room and finally had a clear view of the dining room table I stopped dead.

Peter Cressi was sitting at the table, leaning back calmly in the miasma, the metal box we had exhumed from Charity Reddman’s grave in front of him on the red Formica tabletop. Coiled on top of the metal box was a fat black cat. One of Cressi’s hands was casually scratching the fur along the cat’s back, the other was holding an absurdly large gun.

“We was wondering when you was gonna get back here, Vic. I mean what kind of host are you? No matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find yous liquor.”

Caroline rushed out from behind me. “Victor,” she said, “What is it? What?” and that’s all she said before she stopped, just behind me, so that Cressi, had he wanted to, with that gun and a half of his, could have taken us both out with one shot.

“Well, look who’s with Vic,” said Cressi. “Isn’t this convenient? We was looking for you too, sweetheart.”

The sight of Cressi pointing that gun at me was arresting enough, but it wasn’t he alone that had chilled my blood to viscid. Sitting next to him, elbows on the table, a small pile of ashes resting before him on the Formica like a charred sacrifice, was the source of the nauseating smoke polluting my apartment. It was an old man with clear blue eyes, hairy ears, a stogie the size of a smokestack smoldering between his false teeth.

Calvi.

“CALVI,” I SAID.

“Who was you expecting?” said Calvi, the cigar remaining clamped between his teeth as he spoke. “Herbert Hoover?”

He was a thin wiry man with bristly gray hair and hollowed cheeks and a bitter reputation for violence. The word on Calvi was he talked too damn much, even with that voice scarred painful and rough by decades of rancid tobacco, but Calvi didn’t only talk when there was a more efficient way to communicate. Once, so the story went, he had drilled a man who was skimming off the skim, drilled him literally, with a Black & Decker and a three-quarter-inch bit, drilled him in the skull until the blood spurted and the dumb chuck admitted all and pled for mercy. The downtown boys, they laughed for weeks about that one, but after that one no one dared again to skim the skim from Calvi.

“I heard you called,” said Calvi. “What was it that you wanted, Vic?”

I glanced at Cressi, pointing his gun now at my face, and realized in a flash that I had been all wrong about everything, had trusted wrong and suspected wrong and now was face to face with the man who was behind all the violence that had been unleashed in the past few weeks. Calvi had returned to Philadelphia to wrest control of the city from Raffaello and the one man who could pull me out of what it was I had fallen into, Earl Dante, knew exactly how wrong I had been.

“I just called to say hello,” I said. “See how the weather was down there.”

“Hot,” said Calvi. “Hot as hell but hotter.”

“So I guess you’re up just to enjoy the beautiful Philadelphia spring?”

“I always liked you, Vic,” said Calvi. “I could always trust you, and you want to know why? Because I always understood your motives. You’re a simple man with a simple plan. Go for the dough. The world, it belongs to simple men. I send a guy to you I know he stays stand up and does his time with his mouth shut. No question about it because you know who is paying and it ain’t him, it’s me. And you know what, Vic? You done never let me down.”

“How’s my case going?” asked Cressi. “You got it dismissed yet?”

“That was a lot of guns you were buying, Pete,” I said. “And the flamethrower doesn’t help. But I’m moving to suppress the tapes and whatever else I can.”

“Atta boy,” said Peter.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you, Vic?” said Calvi.

“I think I do.”

“I want to apologize about you being in the car with that thing on the expressway. It couldn’t be helped. But you understand it was only business. No hard feelings, right?”

“Could I afford hard feelings right now?”

“No,” said Calvi.

A gay, friendly smile spread across my face. “Then no hard feelings.”

“You’re exactly what the man, he meant when he said the simple will inherit the earth,” said Calvi. “Let me tell you, when my turn comes, it will be very very profitable. And you, my friend, will share in those profits. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I can count on you?”

I looked at Cressi with his gun and smiled again. “It sounds like a lucrative arrangement.”

“Exactly what I thought you’d say. And I’m taking that as a commitment, so there’s no going back. Now I understand you’ve been in touch with that snake Raffaello.”

“It was only because he was checking up on me after the thing with the car,” I blurted. “I don’t know where he is or what he is…”

“Shut up, Vic,” said Cressi with a wave of his gun and I shut right up.

“We need to meet, Raffaello and me,” said Calvi. “We need to meet and figure this whole thing out. Can you set up this meeting for us, Vic?”

“I can try.”

“Good boy, Vic,” said Calvi. “We’re not animals. If we can avoid a war all the better.”

“I think that’s what he wants too,” I said. “He told me he’s ready to step aside as long as there’s no war and his family is guaranteed safety.”

“He’ll turn over everything?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Everything?”

“So long as you give the guarantees.”