William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“We shared a few meals.”

He turned his head to stare at me again. “You were friends.”

“Calvi doesn’t have friends. He despises everybody equally. But there were those who could stand his cigars, and those who couldn’t. I could, that was all, so we had lunch now and then and chatted about the Eagles.”

“He took a shine to you, all right. But he’s out. The organizational chart has been changed. You should be reporting to me from now on.”

“I don’t report,” I said. “That’s not what I do. I represent my clients to the best of my ability, that is all.”

“That’s never all.”

“With me, that is all.”

“You find out anything you’ll be smart and report to me, see?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dante started sucking his teeth. His mouth opened with a slick leeching sound. “Want to hear a story?”

“Not particularly.”

“Out of high school I enlisted,” said Dante, ignoring my protest. “Want to know why? My father was an animal, that’s why. I was willing to shave my head and take orders like a dog for two years because my father was an animal. But I was also patriotic, see? Still am. I hear the anthem at a ball game and tears spring. I still love my country, even after they sent me to that shithole. See, there was nothing out there that was tougher than my father. I love my goddamn country, but over there I learned there is something beyond patriotism. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s called survival. I didn’t survive by volunteering for every crappy mission some promotion-happy lieutenant dreamed up before we could frag him. And I didn’t survive by taking one step beyond the step I had to take. I survived by remembering that I couldn’t love my country if I was dead, see? Loyalty, it only goes so far. After that it doesn’t go no more. Things are changing fast, Victor. Calvi’s not the only one that’s going, there are others. You make the right choice and you come to me first, understand?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard you visited our friend Jimmy Dubinsky yesterday, so I thought you might like to know. He died this morning. Right there on the operating table.”

“Oh my God.”

“They had that wire up his heart and he had himself a massive. That’s the funny thing about Jimmy, everything about him was massive, even his death. Just thought you might like to know. Funeral’s Friday. Your people, Victor, they don’t mess around when it comes to burying their dead. A guy doesn’t even have time to cool before he’s in the ground.”

“But I just saw him yesterday. He can’t…”

“Some kids they showed up in our unit, we didn’t even want to know their names. You could see it in their eyes they wouldn’t last. I’m seeing that look right now, Victor.” He sucked his teeth again and chucked me on the shoulder. “See you at the funeral.” Then he turned and started walking away, holding his briefcase, walking off to bail out Cressi once again.

The weightlifter gave me a nasty wink and followed him down the corridor.

I watched them go and then fell to the wall, my back against the porous white stone, and covered my eyes with a hand while I shook. Jimmy dead. I had a hard time fathoming it. I actually liked the guy. But the news was worse than that. That tooth-sucking Earl Dante wanted me to pick a side without a scorecard, without a rule book, without even knowing what game we were playing. The way I looked at it, if I picked wrong I would be as dead as Jimmy and if I picked right I would be as dead as Jimmy. All I knew for sure was that I was on the wrong playing field and needed desperately to get out. When I had told Beth I had to flee the law or it would kill me, she didn’t know I was being literal as hell.

And I couldn’t help but think, as I shook against the corridor wall, that my fate in the coming mob apocalypse and my investigation of the dark secrets of the Reddmans would somehow become entwined. I was right, of course, but in a way I could never then have even vaguely imagined.

Belize City, Belize

LAST NIGHT I DREAMTI went to Veritas again. I woke up sweating and shouting from the dream in my room at the guest house in Belize City. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force myself back to sleep. It is morning now and I have sat up all night in my underwear examining the contents of my briefcase, reviewing my mission. There are documents relating to bank accounts and bank records and the flow of great sums of money. There are documents from the State Department in Washington to present to the embassy here. There are pages from the diaries of a dead woman and a letter from a dead man and last night, when I read them together, I felt the same shiver roll through me as rolls through me whenever I read them together, which is often. They are the plainest clues I have as to what curse it was that actually afflicted the Reddmans, those and a carton of ancient ledgers that are still in my office in Philadelphia. The full truth will never be learned, but the man I seek in Belize has much of it, along with my share of the Reddman fortune.

Belize City is a pit, and that is being kind. Antiquated clapboard buildings, unpainted, weathered, streaked with age, line the warrens of narrow streets that stumble off both banks of the rank Belize River. Laundry hangs from lines on listing porches, huge rotting barrels collect rain-water for drinking, the tin roofs citywide are rusted brown. The city is crowded with the poor, it smells of fish and sewage and grease, the drivers are maniacs, the heat is oppressive, the beggars are as relentless as the mosquitoes. It is absolutely Third World and the food is bad. My guest house is right on the Caribbean but there is no beach, only a grubby strip of unpaved road called Marine Parade and then a cement barrier and then the ragged rocks that break the water’s final rush. It is dangerous, I am told, to walk in certain sections at night and those sections seem to change with whomever I talk until the map of danger has encompassed the whole of Belize City. Still, last night I put on my suit and took hold of a map of the town and a photograph from my briefcase and walked west, away from the Caribbean, into the dark heart of the city to see if anyone had seen anything of the man I am stalking.

The night was hot, the air thick, the streets as unenlightened as poverty. Cars cruised past, slowly, like predators. Pickup trucks veered by, teenagers jammed into the beds, shouting at one another in Creole. Guards stared somberly from behind chained gates. A rat scurried toward me from an open sewer, halted and sniffed, scurried back. I stopped at two nightspots, three hotel bars, a wooden shack of a club that overlooked the Caribbean, black as fear in the night except for the relentless lines of iridescent froth dying on the rocks. I had been told the shack club was habituated by lobstermen and sailors and I had wanted especially to visit it, wondering if my prey was sailing on a luxury yacht somewhere off the Belizean cayes. In each joint I bought for myself and whoever was nearby a bottled beer with a Mayan temple on the label, a Belikin, and made what conversation I could. When I showed the picture I tried to see if I could detect anything beneath the denials and the shaking heads, but there was nothing, a whole night of nothing, though I had known from the start that I was trawling bait more than anything else.

Back in my room, I took off my clothes and turned the fan to high and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the moving air to cool my sweat. I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep only to awake with a shout a few hours later when I dreamt of Veritas.