Walter Mosley - The Long Fall

Ryman Lucas and Hal Pittman were ugly men. Lucas had a nose, ears, and eyes that belonged on a much larger head. Pittman was just scary. He was always in a rage, and his face expressed that fact with brutal clarity. They were both white, the same height—under six feet but still way taller than I. They wore bad suits—one camel, that was Lucas, and the other a dusky orange.

I stretched languorously, putting my whole upper body into the movement, then pulled my .38 out of the top drawer and sauntered up toward the entrance.

The buzzer had sounded twice more by the time I’d reached the front door. I pulled it open slowly, then showed the thugs my pistol and gestured with the barrel for them to take seats in the receptionist’s visitors’ chairs.

Aura had replaced the confiscated assault chair with a posh brown-leather thing from somewhere in the bowels of the Tesla. It was set to the height I liked, which made me smile as I settled there before my attentive hostages.

“You don’t need no gun, LT,” Pittman said.

“You, on the other hand, need a new tailor,” I replied.

“Com’on, man,” Lucas chided. “We just here ’cause the man told us to be here.”

“In the beginning,” I said, hoping to prime them.

“Huh?” Lucas asked.

“Why are you here?” I felt the air leaving my lungs and the chair holding my weight.

Pittman recited a ten-digit number that began with the primary Chicago area code. A muscle in my left buttock tightened a bit.

I picked up the receiver with my left hand, cradled it against my ear on that side, and entered the numbers spoken.

On the first ring he answered: “Leonid?”

My right butt cheek knew the voice.

“Mr. Vartan.”

“I’m down on the first floor, south side of the building, at the Coffee Exchange.”

“I’ll be right down.”

I thanked Buddha for his breath in my lungs. Without that little bit of an edge I might have done something crazy—like murder the meãe mjusn sitting before me.

“You guys can go,” I said.

“But—” Pittman began.

I leveled the pistol and pulled back the hammer. That got my unwanted guests to their feet and out the door with no more argument.

This action sounds more deadly than it actually was. It was no more violent than slapping a horse on his belly when he has been acting both willful and lazy.

I WAS SURE that the leg-breakers would be waiting for me at the elevator doors on the first floor. When Harris Vartan tells someone to do something he is bound to be obeyed. That’s just the way things work in his world.

I, however, had left that sphere and could think of no better way to articulate that fact than to use the key that Aura had given me to take the utility elevator down to the first floor.

Vartan was sitting at a corner table, sipping his coffee from a porcelain demitasse cup. His lavender suit was somehow understated, while his tie, made from a print of Picasso’s Guernica , spoke of his sophistication.

With silver hair, olive skin, and eyes that at least appeared to be black, Harris Vartan was either the cream or the scum at the top of the container that is New York City. How you saw him depended on where you stood.

“Hello,” I said.

“Leonid,” the dapper advisor to evil said, giving me a minimal smile. “I see that you’ve eluded Tony’s men.”

This would be the only time that Vartan, known in both police and criminal circles as The Diplomat, would mention The Suit’s name.

You had to be on the ball to keep up with Vartan’s patter. He spoke in allusions and metaphors that were too vague ever be useful as evidence in a courtroom.

“I’m out, Mr. Vartan,” I said. “All the way out.”

The fit septuagenarian allowed another hint of mirth to flit across his lips.

No one gets out, his smile said, unless it’s on his back.

I first met Harris Vartan when I was twelve and he was called Ben Tilly. He and my father worked together as labor organizers, but Ben and my old man went on different paths.

“I’m only asking that you do what you do, Leonid,” he said. “After all, a man is defined by his labor.”

A cell phone sitting on the table started vibrating. Vartan paid it no attention.

“A man is also defined,” I said, “by those who work for him—and those whom he works for.”

“Sometimes it’s not so clear who is working for whom.”

“That may be,” I speculated, “except when the individual in question is self-employed.”

“No man is an island,” Vartan lamented, “no king not a man.”

At that point Lucas and Pittman appeared at the open glass doors of the coffee shop. Vartan raised a solitary finger, stopping them in their tracks.

“Do your job, Leonid,” Vartan said as he stood up from the table. “That’s all anyone expects.”

A waiter came up to him, saying, “Did you want your check, sir?”

“My friend is paying.”

Vartan departed with Tony’s dogs at his heels.

While taking out my wallet I wondered what it was my father’s old friend was telling me. Every nuance, including appearing there with Tony’s men, meant that whatever I did, it had to be just right.

Or not.

Ê€„

28

Ionce had a partner. His name was Bill. Bill was an okay guy and we were, at least from a technical standpoint, an ideal team in a shady kind of way. He was white—a tall, sandy-haired, handsome guy with a couple of years of college, which made him at least literate and able to deal with the concept of two plus two. I was a tree stump of a black man, home-schooled by a dyed-in-the-wool Communist revolutionary, with more books and ideas shoved into my mind than the librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian.

We, Bill and I, did things that would not have made us look good in front of a judge and jury but we were slicker than graphite on a block of ice, so the courts might as well have been in heaven while our feet were mired in New York clay.

I trusted Bill.

He trusted me.

I suspected that he’d slept with my wife a time or two, but Katrina and I slept around so much that the word “betrayal,” in our private lexicon, had synonyms like “naughty” and “sly.”

Bill and I didn’t have an office. We’d meet in coffee shops and stand-up pizza joints, planning how to take down innocents on behalf of our bent clientele. That was half of our business. The other half entailed the secret resolution of internal disputes.

One time we were hired by Four-fingers John Marr to pass a document to the police that would incriminate his rival, Hard Joe Tyner. It was a delicate procedure that took half a day of planning. We did it whær tile strolling through the Museum of Modern Art. Pretending to study the paintings of Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, we hammered out a plan that would hit all the points of the service we provided.

Hard Joe had made one mistake in his otherwise spotless criminal career. He was extorting the president of an insurance company and accepting the money personally through a complex series of money transfers. Marr had gotten a list of the account numbers used. That’s all the cops would need. Once they identified the victim, all they had to do was offer him immunity and Tyner would fall, hard.

But Marr didn’t want his associates to suspect him and so he came to us—me and Bill.

“I don’t see why we can’t just put the shit in an envelope and send it to the detective in charge of investigating organized crime,” Bill said after we gave the guard our tickets.

“Tyner’s people would suspect Marr,” I said patiently. “He’s the one with the most to gain.”

“So?”

“It’s not professional, and anyway a good lawyer might be able to get evidence obtained in that fashion thrown out on some obscure technicality. Also, the police would get suspicious. Or worse, they might get stupid and ignore it.”