Jack O'Connell: Word Made Flesh

Oster puts a foot up on the couch cushion and begins to unlace his boot.

“You were driving for Leonardo Tani tonight, weren’t you, Gilly?”

Gilrein’s stomach churns. He lets out some air, wonders if there’s a bathroom anywhere nearby. He says, “You’re the only one who ever called me Gilly.”

Oster kicks free the boot and goes to work on its mate.

“Not the first time you were Tani’s hack-boy. Breaks my goddamn heart, Gilly.”

Gilrein sits up, hunches over his knees even though it seems to hurt more.

“I’m a cabdriver,” he says. “I got a livery medallion. I pay the city a fortune for the privilege of driving its citizens around town. That’s what I do for a living.”

“You are a goddamn cop,” Oster yells, then quiets. “And goddamn cops don’t haul goddamn piglets like Tani around the goddamn city.”

Gilrein takes a long pull of his drink, wonders if Oster would stop him if he just tried to walk out. He goes for a low voice but it just comes out weak.

“First of all, I haven’t been a cop for a long time now. Unless Bendix has been misplacing my check every week for the past three years—”

“It doesn’t work that way, Gilly,” Oster says and moves to the desk to pick up his drink. “It’s like being a priest. You can’t just walk away. It marks your soul forever.”

“And second,” Gilrein says as if he hasn’t been interrupted, “Leo Tani is a passenger like any other. He pays me my fare and tells me where to take him. It’s none of my business what he does once he gets there.”

“Is that right?” Oster says softly, then turns and moves to the far side of the desk. He slides open the middle drawer, pulls out a manila folder, walks back to Gilrein, and tosses it into his lap.

Against his better judgment, Gilrein opens the file and stares down at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph in sharp focus that shows a human body bound, gagged, hanging by chains from a steel beam. And skinned of any trace of epidermal tissue. The photo is slick to the touch and has a waxy chemical smell that says it’s not long out of the bath.

“Leonardo ‘Vealshank’ Tani,” Oster says, “a.k.a Italo Sciasci, a.k.a. Oreste Calvina, a.k.a. Rollo Griswold …”

“Oh, Jesus,” Gilrein says.

“How many times did you take him down when you were working fraud?”

Gilrein doesn’t answer, just closes the folder.

“How many of your passengers end up like this, Gilly?”

“You whack him, Oster?” in an even voice.

Oster picks up his drink and raises it toward the couch.

“I whacked him, Gilly, there wouldn’t be any photos, would there?”

“The ’Shank was just a goddamn fence. All he tried to do was keep everybody happy.”

“Yeah, well, looks like he dropped the ball sometime last night, doesn’t it?”

“He moved merchandise for people. What the Christ did he do?”

“You’re asking me?” Oster says. ‘You’re the one who spent the night driving his fat carcass around town.”

“Did Kroger do this? Is that why you were in the alley?”

Oster gives an exaggerated shrug, picks up his drink, moves to the gurney and strips off his clothes, dropping them on the floor. Gilrein sees a multicolored field of lines, different lengths and widths, that stretch from Oster’s shoulders down to his ass.

Mrs. Bloch moves around the desk, picks up the clothes, folds them against her body and places them in a neat pile on the desktop. Then she goes back to her felt-covered box and withdraws a cinched bag made of black fabric, maybe satin. She tugs open the drawstring and extracts a set of silver needles. She reaches back into the box and takes out a small glass jar.

Oster hops up onto the table and stretches out on his stomach, turns his head so he faces Gilrein.

“I hope you don’t mind if Mrs. B works while we talk,” he says. “If we miss a night, she loses a little continuity.”

Gilrein knows Oster wants to hear the question and so he stays silent, forces his host to say, “You got any tattoos, Gilly?”

Mrs. Bloch gathers her instruments and moves over to Oster. She puts her back to Gilrein so he can’t see exactly what she’s doing, but she starts to work on the area of the unmarked buttocks.

“Mrs. B is the best. No shit. Blind or no, you cannot find a better skin artist on this coast. She says you feel the design with the fingers, isn’t that right, Mrs. B? Spent some time in Tokyo. Worked on some Yakuza meat, honest to God. Big dragons and flowers. All that symbol shit. Goddamn samurai, you know?”

A new wave of nausea coasts through Gilrein. He turns sideways on the couch, looks out the window down on the main hall below, watches as the stripper puts on a terry-cloth robe and joins one of the couch gangs to study how Filipino bantamweights beat the life out of each other.

“I’m getting the whole body done,” Oster says, folding his arms on the table and resting his head on top. “You ready for this, Gilly? It’s going to be a map of Quinsigamond. The whole town. I’ll be a walking goddamn road map. Can’t wait for the first time somebody asks me directions.”

He tries to look back behind him and Mrs. Bloch barks, “Stei steel.”

Oster stifles a laugh and says, “She’s working on Bangkok Park as we speak. Bangkok on my ass. I love this.”

Gilrein finishes his Spark, gets up off the couch, moves to the desk, and takes the bottle. He stares out the rear window onto the demolished half of the factory, heaps of broken brick and twisted metal and charred wood everywhere. It looks like someone has brought in a bulldozer and tried to organize the destruction into grids, pushed mountains of debris to the sides and created an open central crater before giving up any hope of restoring anything resembling order.

“Why’d you bring me here?” he asks.

There’s a couple seconds of quiet. Voices downstairs explode into whoops and cheering.

“I know it’s horrible, Gilly,” Oster says. “I’ve never been married, but I know it’s got to be killing you. You know, we all loved Ceil. Ceil was the best.”

“We all loved Ceil,” Gilrein repeats and brings the bottle to his lips.

“But it’s just a building, all right? And it’s the only place you’re going to be safe for a while.”

Gilrein swallows. “Safe from Kroger, maybe. But what about you and the rest of the boys?”

“Oh, that’s not nice at all, Gilly. That’s out of line. That’s just goddamn outrageous. A fellow officer—”

“People disappear,” Gilrein says, quoting the graffiti behind the bar, “right, Oster? Isn’t that still the motto of the Magicians?”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing here, from a brother officer—”

“I’m just an independent hack-boy who drives piglets like Leo Tani on their mob errands.”

Oster says, “You’re all turned around, Gilrein.”

And Mrs. Bloch says, “Du stei steel,” and swats his buttocks.

“What were you doing in the alley, Sergeant?”

“Saving your lousy ass,” Oster says. “For all the good it’s going to do you.”

Gilrein walks over to the gurney, stands so that Oster has to twist his neck to see him.

“I didn’t want anything to do with the Magicians when I was a cop. I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with you scumbags now.”

Mrs. Bloch breaks off from inking an alleyway in Little Asia, folds her arms and waits for her canvas to explode.

Oster just stares up, then smiles, rests his head back down onto his arms and closes his eyes as if to nap.

Gilrein moves for the office door, taking the bottle of Light White Spark with him.

“You know what, Gilly?” Oster says, and Gilrein stops in the doorway. “I think the wrong cop died when this place blew to hell.”