The Bouncer, Page 2

  “As far as I know,” Joe said. “But don’t worry. Just stick close to me. I made a call. We’ll be out …” He hesitated, not wanting to promise too much. “… eventually.”

  Then Derek squeezed by. “Hey, Joe!”

  “Hi, Derek.” They shook hands. Joe liked Derek, a Chinese kid from Flushing. He was young, twenty-one or -two at the most, but unlike a lot of the young dudes, he wasn’t fixated on either impressing you or snarling if you seemed unimpressed, a routine that Joe found exhausting. Derek had a positive attitude. He was more like a cheerful go-getter, an eager up-and-coming professional. His profession was thief.

  Joe gestured at the packed bench. Ten guys butt-to-butt. “I’d say have a seat, but it would need to be on my lap.”

  Derek grinned. “That’s okay. I’ll let you elders sit, like on the bus.” He looked around. “This is some shitshow, though, right?”

  “That’s the word I’d pick.”

  “Three of my uncle’s places got shut down. Man, is he pissed off.”

  “Rightfully so.”

  Derek’s uncle ran numerous gambling parlors in the Chinese parts of town. He also shipped stolen cars, jewelry, and antiques to mainland China via the black market, a substantial percentage of which Derek stole.

  Derek crouched down and asked in a quieter voice, “Who’s this?” nodding his chin at Jerry.

  “Just a guy from the club. He’s okay.”

  Derek leaned in closer. “Look, seeing as you’re going to be out of work like me, I thought I’d tell you about a little something I could let you in on.”

  Joe nodded, just a fraction of an inch, but enough for Derek to continue: “It’s a heist. A contract job. The plan, the client, everything is set up. We just need one more man.”

  “To do what?”

  Derek grinned. “I know you don’t like the heavy stuff, so you can drive.” He punched Joe’s arm lightly. “You’re one of the few I’d trust behind the wheel.”

  Joe laughed. “Thanks, but I don’t know. Like you said, I’m old and lazy. This sounds …” He shrugged. “… exciting.”

  “I know, I know. Cowboys and Indians. Or native peoples or whatever the fuck. But I’ve got to earn. I’m getting married in a month.”

  “Really? Congratulations. So is Jerry over here.”

  “No shit?” Derek sighed. “Man, I love this girl, but to be honest, I’m kind of losing it.”

  Joe stood up and gave Derek his seat. “So is Jerry. You two should talk.”

  It was well into the next day when Joe got out. Gio’s lawyer sprang him and the other club employees. Jerry and Derek were helped by the relatives or friends they’d called. By the time they got reprocessed all over again, and walked out of the detention center and onto Baxter Street as free men, it was lunchtime. Enough time for Jerry and Derek to bond and for Jerry to insist that both of them come to his wedding. He hugged them each tightly and ran off. His dad was double-parked and angrily honking. Derek made a quieter exit, slipping off to a white BMW purring up the block. Joe was thinking about getting an iced coffee from one of the Vietnamese places across from the Tombs, where he’d been going for pho and crispy squid almost as long as he’d been getting arrested: strong black coffee dripped onto sticky, sweet condensed milk and then poured onto ice. Then he saw that cute Fed from last night. She was standing to the side, wearing shades, watching the parade of arrestees go by. She was dressed in a suit now, some kind of silky black fabric over a silky white blouse. It was, well, very FBI. She was a suit after all, but hers was cut to hang and cling quite gracefully on narrow shoulders and the curve of chest and hips. No doubt it cost quite a bit. As did her haircut: her hair was down now and Joe could see it was very long, very shiny, and very black. He didn’t realize how black until he saw it in the daylight.

  He smiled and gave a little wave, and when she nodded, he walked over.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Or afternoon.”

  “You, too,” she said, not really looking at him, or at least not turning her head. “Nice night?”

  “I’ve had worse. You?”

  “Busy,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much.”

  “That’s too bad. They don’t pay you enough to work so hard.”

  She looked at him. “Who says I was working?”

  Joe laughed. Emboldened, he said, “Hey, how about, just to show there’s no hard feelings—want to come with me to a wedding?”

  Now she laughed. He’d caught her off guard. “When?”

  “Tonight! That’s whose bachelor party you raided.”

  “In that case, I don’t know that I’d be welcome.”

  “Of course you would. Jerry is all heart. And it’s going to be a Scottish-Korean wedding. Should be pretty wild.”

  “That does sound like fun. But I’m busy. Maybe another time.” And now she smiled, a real smile, right at him as she turned and went inside. Joe watched her, then saw Crystal and Kimberly among a group of women being released through another door and heading toward a waiting black car.

  “Hey, ladies,” he called, walking over. “Can you give me a ride?”

  5

  Agent Donna Zamora was surprised at herself. She’d slipped. She’d let herself be charmed, even found herself flirting before she realized she was doing it, and with a perp, a bouncer from a titty bar who just went by Joe. Even for her pretty much disastrous love life, that was a step down. Who said I was working? How could she have said that? It was shameless, she thought, and, if her colleagues had heard, brainless. Then why was she smiling as she recalled him smiling, the look of happy surprise on his face, that air he had of being in on some secret joke? But was the joke with her? On her? On himself?

  Anyway, a smile was a smile, and she had to take what she could get, stuck in a dead-end job in a shitty little office, as far from the action as you could be and still wear a gun to work: She was the tip girl. The hotline. And no, that was not as sexy as it sounds. What she did was answer calls all day from loyal citizens who thought their neighbors’ trash smelled suspicious and comb through e-mails from watchful civilians who noticed their cabdriver had a Muslimish name, or that someone left a pizza box on the subway, or the loud party on the roof had Mexican-sounding music. Never mind that she was part Mexican and part Puerto Rican herself. Never mind her degree and being the best shot in her class at Quantico. In the white-bread locker-room culture of the FBI, Donna was stuck in the dreary job of manning—even the verb was discriminatory—the tip line, dealing with every dumb-ass who sees something and says something. Unless she could make one of the tips pay. That was why, when that cokehead from Canarsie called about the Middle Eastern businessmen getting hand jobs from blondes in the VIP lounge at Club Rendezvous, she strapped up and rode along. At least it got her out in the field for a night, in the open air, where she could breathe a little. And maybe even run.

  She sighed, glancing up at the photos and sketches of the top ten faces on the terrorist watch list, faces that stared at her all day, mocking her, daring her to find them in the bottomless pile of bullshit she shoveled. She gave them all the finger. She killed her cold coffee and got ready to return another pointless call when the phone rang. It was her direct extension, most likely another small-time sleazebag or paranoid schizophrenic looking for reward money. She picked up.

  “Good afternoon, this is Agent Zamora, do you have a crime to report?”

  “Hi,” a friendly, non-sleazy, non-schizo voice said. “My name is Giovanni Caprisi. I want to come by and talk.”

  Giovanni fucking Caprisi. Gio the Gent. Coming by. In the flesh. To talk. Holy shit. Donna laughed out loud. She’d won the lottery. A major OC target. The head of a goddamn Mafia crime family, coming in of his own free will. Who knows what he wanted or whom he was ready to give up? Maybe he was looking to tip her off about a competitor or a rival from within his family. Maybe he was ready to chuck it in, turn state’s evidence, and go into witness protection. If it broke right, it could be a career-making c
ase. For sure it would get her off the tip line.

  So she told him yes, absolutely, come right over. She called and left his name downstairs. Then she ran to the restroom, got her look together, and came back to wait calmly until she got the knock on the door.

  “Agent Zamora, your guest is here,” the young agent, a crew-cut boy in a blazer, said.

  “Thanks. Send him in.”

  The boy held the door. And there, in a really lovely tan summer suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie, with polished shoes and a Rolex but no gold or rings besides his wedding band, was Gio. He smiled.

  “Agent Zamora? It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you, Mr. Caprisi.”

  They shook.

  “Please call me Gio.” He looked around the tiny windowless room. “I’m in the right place? This is where I come to cooperate?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, moving a stack of useless files from a chair. “Please sit down. And let me assure you that whatever you need from us in exchange for your cooperation, I can get it for you.”

  “Great. I was hoping you’d say that.” He brushed the seat off and sat, hitching his trousers.

  “If you need protection for your family, a new identity, even a new face—it’s no problem.”

  “A new face!” He laughed and stroked his chin. “What’s wrong with this one? I just had it shaved. You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s … a very nice face. And a very nice close shave, too. I mean, in exchange for your testimony. If you decide to turn state’s witness against your associates in organized crime.”

  Gio laughed harder. “I’m sorry.” He caught his breath. “I’m afraid you’ve got me confused with someone else. I’m just here as a concerned citizen. I know nothing about organized crime. Sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

  She sat down, sinking into her chair as her hopes sank, too. “Then what do you want to talk to me about?”

  “Terrorism.”

  “What about terrorism?”

  “I think it’s horrible. It has to be stopped.”

  “Yes. We here at the FBI agree.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear that. And I want to help.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr… . Gio. I don’t follow. How can you help?”

  “Well, as I mentioned, I’m a concerned citizen, and in the course of my ordinary activities I meet a lot of people and learn a lot of things. Some of them just might be people you’re interested in. And at the same time, I also know other people, friends of mine, other loyal citizens, whose businesses are being … interfered with by friends of yours.”

  “You mean like your club?”

  “Club Rendezvous? That’s not mine. That club happens to be owned by my cousin’s wife’s neighbor.”

  “That’s right,” Donna said. “I forgot. Yettie Greenblatt. The eighty-two-year-old strip club owner.”

  “Exactly. Poor lady. Her husband’s gone. That club is all she has. So let’s say I was able to give you, like, one of these guys up here.” He nodded at the grim men on the wall, none quite as well shaven as he. “Maybe you’d turn around and help Mrs. Greenblatt with her club.”

  “Do you have information about a wanted terrorist?”

  “Right this moment? No. But I could help look. I could organize, like, a volunteer search party for you. You know, like a deputy. You guys deputize people.”

  “No. Actually, to my knowledge, we don’t. And even if we could, I’m not going to deputize a gangster and turn him loose to hunt for terrorists in exchange for complicity in his illegal activities.”

  “Whoa. Easy!” Gio laughed, putting his hands up. “You’re making it sound much bigger than it is. I was just thinking out loud. How about this? Just as a hypothetical. A thought experiment.”

  “A thought experiment?”

  “Let’s say someone anonymously called you and hypothetically helped you catch some of these guys. Would that make life easier for people like Mrs. Greenblatt?”

  “Hypothetically?”

  “Purely.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I suppose it would.”

  “Great,” Gio said, jumping up and shaking her hand. “Thanks so much for your time. And if I see any of these fellows, you’re the first one I’m going to call.”

  He left, shutting the door softly behind him. A second later, she burst out laughing. What a joke. At least she hadn’t told anybody about her big case. Anyway, it broke up the day. She’d tell her mom about it later, when she stopped by to pick up her kid, and her mom would laugh with her again. She was still chuckling when her phone rang and she picked up.

  “Agent Zamora?”

  It was her NYPD liaison.

  “Yes. Hi. Sorry, I was just clearing my throat. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got news on that missing person you asked about? One Billy Rio?”

  “Yes?”

  Billy Rio was the cokehead from Canarsie. The one who’d dropped a dime on Gio’s—or Mrs. Greenblatt’s—club. He hadn’t shown up to get his reward money—very un-cokehead behavior. And his phone was dead. And his mom, whose basement he lived in, hadn’t seen him. So Donna had asked the locals to keep an eye out.

  “Yeah, my snitch. What’s up?”

  “Good news. We found him,” the liaison said. “Well, most of him. Anyway, enough to ID.”

  6

  Gio knew that timing was extremely important. He wanted to make an entrance, to show up after all the others had arrived. But he didn’t want to keep them waiting too long, either, to bore or bruise any of the overripe egos stuffed into that warehouse, like the place where they stored the Thanksgiving Day parade balloons. And though the security procedures had been exhaustive—the grounds and the guests swept for bugs, cell phones collected at the door—the likelihood of at least some of his visitors being under surveillance was high and the window of opportunity small. So when his new burner phone rang, signaling that the party was assembled, he had his guy Nero, who was driving, pull right up, and only nodded at the guard by the gate before hurrying in.

  At least they didn’t need to worry about cameras, he thought, as the heavy steel gate swung shut behind him. This place was vast, a kind of indoor landscape enclosed in corrugated steel. Mountains of rock salt and sand, stories high, sat here waiting for winter, shielded from rain and wind by an arching roof and walls. It was built on a pier. On three sides was water, where the barges unloaded, ton upon ton, and on the shore side, a fenced-in asphalt lot, where the trucks loaded it back up. Gio walked between these dunes, the sun slowly sinking out there somewhere behind the wall, but its rays leaking in through every crack and seam in the rusted shed—in spots the corrosion was like lace, or a confessor’s screen—and falling on the artificial mountain range, illuminating its fractured planes, its grains and crystals, painting it red and gold, throwing long and foreshortened shadows over the narrow valleys. He emerged into a section where snowplows were stored, stacked like gigantic spoons high above him. Behind this barricade, in an open area, folding chairs had been set up around bridge tables. On each table were a bowl of fruit, a bottle of seltzer, a bucket of ice, and an assortment of liquor bottles. Off to one side a kid in a suit and tie stood behind an espresso machine. But at a glance, Gio could see that nothing had been touched, except the ashtrays, anachronistically set out in this raw space filled with dirt.

  For the most part, despite some gold on teeth, chains, and fingers, and some rough jailhouse tattoos and colored leather, the twenty or so guests looked like what they were, successful businesspeople gathered for serious business. All but one were men—the exception being Little Maria, a diminutive, cheerful woman who, since her husband died, had ruthlessly run most of the Dominican-controlled heroin trade. If you had a bodega on your corner that seemed to sell nothing but some dusty cans of soup and stale candy, that probably belonged to Maria. In age they ranged from midthirties, like Gio himself and Alonzo, who was there representing the black gangs in Brooklyn, to who knows, like the round and ageless U
ncle Chen, who ran Flushing (not the Korean parts), and the ancient, black-clad, white-bearded Hasid Menachem “Rebbe” Stone, who, despite his grandfatherly demeanor, ran the Orthodox underworld with an iron hand.

  Gio walked in and took a deep breath as the guests all turned to him. “Good afternoon, and thank you for coming. I can’t even say what a great honor it is that you would all make the trip. I also want to thank my cousin Ricky for providing the location.” He nodded at Ricky, who beamed. Actually he was not a cousin; he was Gio’s cousin’s husband’s kid, and he was a dimwit, and Gio had given him a low-end easy job looking after a couple of union locals, out of family guilt. The obscurity of this small-time operation was part of what made it safe. “Ricky?” he said again. “Thank you.”

  Ricky jumped, getting the hint, and hurried off, taking the barista—his son—with him. The kid was a real barista who ran a trendy little café in a Carroll Gardens building the family owned. Gio pulled up a chair and sat down. The others all leaned forward and stared in stony silence.

  “We all know why we’re here. We’re all in the same bind and it’s hurting. None of us can get back to business till these terrorists are caught. Problem is, the cops couldn’t catch crabs in a whorehouse. Not that anyone here’s whores have crabs.”

  There were some laughs, and the ice was broken.

  “Okay, we all know we’re fucked. I didn’t drive an hour to remind myself of that.” That was Alexei, a Russian mob boss from Brighton Beach. He lit another cigarette. “The question is, what can we do about it? You have an answer for that one, Gio?”

  “I do. We catch them.”

  “Who? The crabs?” Everyone laughed again and Alexei grinned, though Gio felt that was kind of milking the joke. But he smiled to be polite.

  “We catch the terrorists, my friend.”

  Alexei paused, staring for a moment. Then he tossed his head back and laughed, bigger than ever. Others joined in. “Gio, you really are crazy,” he said. “But I admit you have balls. Catch the terrorists.”