Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

“Hey, moron, doesn’t make any difference.”

“I am afraid I will have to disagree with you, my friend.”

He gets up from the desk and moves around it until he’s facing Gilrein. Raban comes off the couch and plays valet, helping the boss shirk out of his suit coat. Kroger starts to unbutton his shirt cuffs.

“I’m not quite the fool you wish to paint me,” he says, beginning to fold the cuffs back on themselves. “I’ve asked around the city. I’ve spoken to people both inside City Hall and above City Hall. I’ve confirmed and reconfirmed your status in this matter.”

“And what,” Gilrein grudgingly has to ask, “is this matter?”

“I believe you may have something that belongs to me.”

Gilrein shakes his head. “Like I tried to tell these shitheads the other night, you’re mistaken. You’ve gotten hold of some bad information.”

Kroger pulls down the corners of his mouth and shakes his head. He looks like someone’s deranged grandfather. He turns to the couch and signals for his vermin to approach, then goes to work on his other shirt cuff as Blumfeld and Raban cross the room, take hold of Gilrein and force him into the visitor’s chair.

He doesn’t resist. He looks up at Kroger and says, “You know, it’s never the big guys who give you the problems. Never the Kinskys. Never Willy Loftus or Reverend James. It’s always some little low-end cheesehead who can’t get a handle on how the city is played.”

“Have you eaten anything recently?” Kroger asks, doing the friendly country doctor as he puts a rubbery bib-apron on over his head. “Say in the past three to six hours?”

“My people will feed your heart to the dogs, you stupid bastard.”

“I only ask,” Kroger continues as Raban pulls Gilrein’s arms behind the chair and handcuffs the wrists together, “because it can be a problem. Every now and then, you’ll hear of a case of asphyxiation. Choking on the vomit, you understand.”

Now Gilrein starts to struggle and Blumfeld immediately puts a brutal choke hold on him, one fat arm wrapped tight around the throat, the other bound in the opposite direction across the forehead. And when Gilrein hears him suck in a deep breath, he becomes convinced that this animal is about to snap his neck, to just twist and squeeze and shove until all those small, fragile bones at the rear base of the head begin to tear free from one another.

Gilrein tries to throw himself forward to the floor, but he can’t move. Kroger steps in front of him, leans in, squinting, pulls a piece of lint or a thread from the front of Gilrein’s flannel shirt, brings it up close to the eyes and examines it.

“My father,” Kroger says, casual voice, fingering the fabric like a soft jewel, “was a tailor. Back in Maisel. A very skilled craftsman.”

Raban moves across the room, opens a closet, returns a second later carrying a brown leather satchel that in places has been worn toward a milk white. It resembles a doctor’s bag, with a flat bottom and a brass latch. Kroger takes the satchel, places it on the desk, releases the latch and bends open the hinges. He dips a hand inside the bag and begins to fish around.

“I spent a great deal of time in my father’s shop. As any boy would.”

Gilrein can smell a musklike cologne coming off of Blumfeld.

“My father hoped I would follow in his footsteps, of course. And I did learn the trade. I would help him during the busy season. I became very proficient with the needle and the thread.”

And he pulls a fat spool of heavy black fiber from the bag and sets it down. It looks like twine or a ridiculously thick suture.

“It is interesting, yes? You, Mr. Gilrein, have chosen to pursue the family business, am I correct? Your father was also a chauffeur, true?”

Blumfeld lets out a laugh without releasing any pressure from his hold. Kroger loves the response and he jerks back a little, looks around to Raban, lets out his own laugh, too loud and self-conscious. Then he shakes his head, dips back into the bag and pulls out a small, flat case, like an undersized billfold, crafted in what looks like the same soft leather as the satchel. There’s a zipper stitched around the edge of the wallet and Kroger begins to unfasten it as he speaks.

“To this day, Mr. Gilrein, I regret that I had to disappoint my father. I could not fulfill his wishes. It was not meant to be. My interests lay elsewhere, as they say.” He gestures to the room around him. “I loved the books. Maisel was a town quite rich in literature. The libraries and the book dens. The merchant carts filled with the old volumes. Sold by the kilo, if you can believe it”—a pause, as if remembering something, then, just as suddenly, back to business. “When my father passed away, the tailor shop closed its doors. But this bag”—touching the satchel gently, looking down on it and smiling—“is testament to his memory. The tools of his trade.”

Kroger makes a job out of removing a large ruby ring from his left hand and depositing it in his pants pocket.

“When I left my homeland, I had to depart quickly. But I could not leave my father’s bag behind. Whenever I take it out, as I have now, it brings him back to me. Do you know what I’m trying to say, Mr. Gilrein? I take out my papa’s tools and I’m transported back to Maisel. The Maisel of my youth. Which, of course, is long gone. The smell of the tailor shop. The steam from the presses mixing with the cut leather and the cabbage stew mother would send …”

He drifts off for a second, then, “I can almost taste it now, yes, Blumfeld?”

Blumfeld shakes his head enthusiastically and Gilrein’s windpipe blocks off for just a moment.

Kroger opens the wallet and reveals a display of silver sewing needles, a dozen or more, all held in a line of increasing size by securing loops. He pulls a midsize needle free, holds it up slightly above his head and studies it as if inspecting a diamond or a photographic negative.

“Zamarelli needles,” Kroger says, “and quite hard to come by in those difficult years. Nothing but the finest tools for Father. My mother, she would shake her head. We ate radish soup three nights a week, but father had to have the Zamarelli.”

“I think,” he says softly, maybe to himself, “this one will do nicely.”

And Gilrein tries once again to break free, fall to the floor, do anything but sit here and allow the realization of what’s about to happen to him. It’s useless. His movements only cause Blumfeld to tighten his grip.

Through clenched jaws, Gilrein manages to say, “You’re making a mistake.”

But Kroger is already threading the suture through the eye of his needle.

“Mr. Gilrein,” he says, “the beauty of dealing with someone as insignificant as yourself is that I can’t make a mistake. There is nothing to be lost. You are no longer a policeman. You have no family. No powerful friends. You live in a barn, for God’s sake. An attic dweller. You don’t exist beyond your pathetic role as a driver. A deliveryman. Even your passengers forget you the moment they step out of the taxi. You are a shadow, Mr. Gilrein. I can do anything I want to you. And no one will care.”

He comes to stand directly in front of Gilrein, the needle and the spool of thread cupped in the palm of his hand, held out before him like an offering.

“I am going to ask you a final time. You have taken something which belongs to me. I intend to locate it. Now, Mr. Gilrein, you can either help me in this matter or you can waste my time. But if you do not answer me right now, right at this moment, I am going to be forced to teach you a very dear lesson.”

He lifts the threaded needle up to his mouth, dips the point just inside his lips and moistens the tip, withdraws the needle and lowers it down toward Gilrein’s face, as if it were a minuscule chalice.