So Ivan and Leonid, now calling themselves John and Leo, became the proprietors of the Jolly Jackal. They found it amusing to be, once again, in the field of recreational beverages. And the bar was good cover for their real business: Random people could come and go at all hours, and nobody official cared what was going on, as long as John and Leo paid off the various municipal inspectors. The only downside to owning a bar, they found, was that people sometimes came in and actually wanted to buy drinks. But Leo was able to keep that to a minimum via a combination of poor service and occasionally hitting patrons with his bat.
Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your «collectors» and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit.
But their best local customer, by far, was a local outfit that was always in the market for serious, big-ticket weapons, the kind of weapons real armies fight real wars with. John and Leo had no idea why anybody in Miami would need so much firepower, nor did they care. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was that when they got hold of a serious weapon, this outfit would usually buy it, no haggling, for cash.
The man who delivered the cash was the man who walked into the Jolly Jackal with the briefcase while Puggy was watching the couples argue about lip fuzz on Jerry Springer. Leo, standing at the cash register, nodded as the man walked past. John rose from his table and quietly greeted the customer by name.
"Hello, Mr. Herk," he said.
It was, indeed, Arthur Herk, spouse abuser, embezzler, and legal owner of Puggy's tree. Arthur's employer, Penultimate, Inc., builder of faulty buildings, was John and Leo's big local customer. The reason Penultimate was buying weapons — in fact the whole reason Penultimate existed in the first place — was that it was planning to take over Cuba once Fidel was dead. Quite a few organizations in South Florida, not to mention Cuba, were planning to do this. One thing you could say for sure about post-Castro Cuba: It would not lack for leadership.
Arthur was the bag man for Penultimate. That was pretty much his entire mid-level-executive job: delivering bribes and other illegal payments. He had done this job reasonably well until a few months before, when his gambling problem had begun to get out of hand. He'd come out of work one day and found two men waiting for him in the parking lot; they'd informed him that, unless he came up with a very specific amount of money within twenty-four hours, they would have no choice but to remove one of his fingers without benefit of anesthetic. They'd taken Arthur around to the back of their car, opened the trunk, and made him look inside. On the floor of the trunk was a pair of pruning shears. Arthur peed his pants.
So Arthur began skimming cash from the bribes, just enough to keep all his digits through the next week. He hoped, with the irrational hope of the true loser, that somehow the money would not be missed, or that its loss would be blamed on somebody else. But of course it was missed. Arthur's superiors said nothing to him; they didn't want to spook him into running to the police. They let him continue his bribe deliveries while they quietly brought Henry and Leonard down from New Jersey to take care of the situation. Their intention was that it would look like a gambling-related mob hit, nothing to do with Penultimate.
When Arthur's thirty-five-inch Sony TV got assassinated, he had figured out that he was meant to be the victim, and that whoever fired the shot had been hired by Penultimate. But when Arthur walked into the Jolly Jackal, John and Leo did not know anything about this. As far as they were concerned, Arthur was connected to a valued customer, and so they treated him courteously, although like everybody else who dealt with him, they thought he was an asshole.
"Do you want something to drink?" asked John.
"Vodka," said Arthur, who always wanted something to drink.
John said something in Russian to Leo, who brought over a glass of vodka. Arthur grabbed it, gulped the contents, set the glass down, and leaned in toward John. His eyes were red; his voice raspy.
"Like I told you on the phone," he said, "I need a missile."
"I see," said John. "This is for you? This is personal missile?"
"What the fuck do you care?" said Arthur.
It was a good point. John did not really care. He was just curious, because Arthur had never before mentioned, let alone taken delivery of, a weapon. He always just dropped off the money.
"It must be missile?" John asked.
"Is mat a problem?" Arthur asked.
"Unfortunately," said John, "right now we do not have missile. Missile is very hard to get." It was true. The market for missiles was tight; somebody was snapping them all up. Rumor was that it was either Iraq or Microsoft.
"Well," said Arthur, "I want you to try very fucking hard to come up with something for me." Arthur mocked John's pronunciation of "very," so it sounded like "wary."
John, hearing the mockery, considered having Leo escort Arthur out. But John was a businessman, and a customer was a customer.
"How are you wanting to use this weapon?" he asked.
"Never mind how I am vonting to use this vep-pon," mimicked Arthur. "Just gimme a serious vep-pon."
Arthur did not plan to use the weapon as a weapon. He knew nothing about weapons. The whole reason he wanted one was that he was planning to save his butt by going to the feds and telling them what he knew about Penultimate — the contracts, the bribes, the Jolly Jackal, and anything else he could think up or make up. In his panicked, alcohol-impaired mental state, he had concluded that the surest way he could get the feds' attention would be to show up with an actual Russian missile.
"How much you pay?" asked John.
Arthur pushed the briefcase across the table. "Ten thousand," he said. "You can count it." Arthur himself had counted the briefcase contents earlier. At that time, there had been $15,000, in packages of twenties, but Arthur had taken $5,000 for himself, stuffing $500 in his wallet and the rest into his pants pockets. He was supposed to have delivered the $15,000 two days earlier to a Dade County commissioner, who was then supposed to cast the deciding vote to award Penultimate a contract to build fourteen bus shelters, every single one of which would, what with one thing and another, wind up costing the taxpayers of Dade Country as much as a luxury two-bedroom condominium on Key Biscayne.
John opened the briefcase, glanced inside, then closed the lid. He continued looking at the briefcase as he considered the situation. On the one hand, this whole transaction stank. This idiot across from him was clearly way out of his league here. On the other hand, cash was cash. And if the idiot really didn't care what he was buying, John saw a way not only to make a little money, but also to solve a problem that had been bothering him.