They come through the door to find the Blade talking to a warehouse worker, a woman whose name Bobby doesn’t know. Par for the course with the Blade, a pussy hound if ever there was one. Bobby’s about to make the Blade very happy. He’s about to tell the Blade there’s a hooker who needs to be taken off the street and questioned. He’s about to tell the Blade he doesn’t really care what happens to the hooker afterward.
SIX
Carter fires up his computer shortly after finishing breakfast on Monday morning. He’s expecting confirmation of a wire transfer to his bank in Panama, payment for a job well done. Sure enough, the money’s right where it’s supposed to be and Carter immediately transfers the full amount to a bank in Moscow. Instructions for the Moscow bank are already in place. After deducting their commission, the bank will move the cash to a smaller bank in the South Pacific that doesn’t record the money’s next – and final – destination.
His business concluded, Carter turns to his email box, deleting the spam before opening a heavily encrypted email from Paul Marginella, universally called Paulie Margarine. Paulie is Carter’s agent. He secures the jobs and makes the payments after deducting his commission. But not any more.
Hey kid, I got some bad news for you. Or maybe not. It depends on how you’re doin these days. But I ain’t been feeling right for a long time now and I’m gonna have to shut the operation down. No hard feelins, OK? We did good while we could (hey, that rhymes – I’m a poet who don’t know it) and we have to move on. Best of luck. Paulie.
Carter takes the message to Sweat & Strain, a gym on 10th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. He focuses on three words as he rides cross-town on the L Train: Or maybe not. For some time now, Carter’s been tempted to break off the relationship himself. In his own mind, he compares each job to a combat deployment. Maybe the odds against being killed or wounded in any given operation are great, but if you’re deployed over and over again ... Carter doesn’t bother to complete the thought. He’s killed twenty-three men in fourteen cities over the past two-plus years, and the cops investigated every death. Sure, he’s protected himself. The emails that pass between Carter and Paulie are the sum total of their contact, and they do not go directly from Paulie’s computer to his. Paulie’s emails are addressed to an email forwarder in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. From Minsk, they voyage to the websites of three forwarders on three different continents before Carter retrieves them. One of the spook agencies, the CIA or the NSA, might be able to track and decrypt the emails, but not a local cop shop.
But if Carter can’t be traced through Paulie Margarine, there’s still the possibility that he’ll be caught at the scene of the crime, say by a police cruiser turning on to the block at just the wrong time, or be tracked down because he missed a surveillance camera or left a minuscule bit of DNA behind, despite his many precautions.
In Carter’s opinion, there are no guarantees. In Carter’s opinion, the most remote outcome is rendered probable by enough repetitions.
So Carter’s relieved on the one hand. Paulie’s absolutely correct – it’s time to move on. But coming right after Janie’s passing, the prospect of a career change adds fuel to an already smoldering fire.
Carter doesn’t neglect his workout. He works harder than usual, in fact. S&S is run by a mixed martial artist named Jordan Boone who promotes his self-defense system, which includes a dozen manuals selling for ten dollars each on the gym’s website. Boone claims to have distilled his method from ‘every martial art on the planet.’
Forget about tactics that work in a ring or a cage. Self-defense is about protecting yourself from attack by incapacitating your opponent long enough to get away.
That’s all bullshit, of course, at least in Carter’s opinion. Half the patrons of Boone’s gym are serious knuckleheads far more likely to be the attacker than the attacked. But the system, with its kicks, strikes and throws, works as well as any other. You practice the moves, over and over and over, until each and every opening draws the appropriate counter-attack, until you see and strike before you’re conscious of what you’re going to do next. Then, if you’re Carter, you run away. Carter has no criminal record and the last thing he wants to do is draw the attention of the police.
Most of the regulars at Sweat & Strain outweigh Carter, especially the ones who juice with steroids. But Carter’s not only fast, he’s also fearless, and he’s acquired a bit of a reputation. He’s not surprised when a pro named Johnny ‘The Crusher’ Carpenter asks him to work out. They go at it for an hour, until Carpenter breaks it off and heads for the showers. Carter would like nothing more than to follow – he’s gotten much the worse of the exchanges – but he has one additional task ahead, one he absolutely hates, skipping rope. Which is why he forces himself to do it.
Six hours later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Carter approaches the front door of a house on a tree-lined street in Astoria, Queens. The single-story house isn’t much to look at – brick walls, shingled roof, a picture window in the living room – but it rests on a generous lot surrounded by a thick hedge in the back. Carter hesitates only for a moment before ringing the bell.
The man who opens the door is about Carter’s age, but that’s the only resemblance between the two. He’s fifty pounds heavier than Carter, with a serious gut and jowls befitting a man twice his age.
‘Can I help you?’ he asks.
‘I’m here to see Paulie Marginella.’ Carter knows this must be Paulie’s son, Freddy, who was in prison the last time Carter and Paulie met. ‘Does he still live here?’
‘And who are you?’
‘My name’s Carter.’
Freddy’s double take proves one thing: Paulie’s got a big mouth. Carter smiles. ‘I know I’m not expected, but I heard that Paulie’s not feeing well ...’
‘My dad’s in the backyard, catching a few rays.’ Freddy steps aside to let Carter into a small foyer. ‘This is about what exactly ...’
‘It’s about me paying my respects to a sick friend.’
Although Freddy fixes Carter with a hard stare, he’s not his father’s son. Carter’s not intimidated and he simply returns the stare, his eyes blank.
‘All right, hang out here for a minute. I’ll ask if he wants to see you.’
Freddy’s back two minutes later. He nods and leads Carter through the living room to a sliding glass door. The door’s open and he points through it to a man sitting in a wheelchair positioned on a small patch of sunlit grass. There’s a second chair next to him, a folding lawn chair with plastic webbing stretched across a tarnished aluminum frame.
‘Lemme know when you’re ready to leave,’ Freddy says. ‘Dad wants to talk to you alone.’
Paulie Margarine’s backyard is nicely sculpted. A small bed of yellow tulips, a cluster of intertwined birch trees, a Japanese maple, its spider-thin leaves barely opened, that might have been lifted from a Bonsai pot. Against the side of the house, an enormous lilac, more a tree than a bush, perfumes the warm May air.
Carter acknowledges the contrast as he crosses the lawn. Every living thing in Paulie’s yard has dedicated itself to renewal, except for Paulie Margarine. Paulie’s as thin as a rail and his skin is a shade of yellow that no tulip will ever reproduce. Emblazoned with the logo of the New York Mets, a thick blanket wraps his body from his neck to his feet. The hand that emerges from beneath the blanket is bony enough to be the claw of a diving raptor.