‘Do you know who supplies him with girls in LA and NYC?’
‘I used to do it with Judy before I retired.’ He says it with no discomfort that Billy can detect.
‘Judy Blatner? Nick says she doesn’t touch jailbait.’
‘She doesn’t. Nothing under eighteen. And that used to be good enough for Klerke. Then he wanted younger. He’d call. Say he wanted dumplings. That was the code word.’
Dumplings, Billy thinks. Jesus.
‘Judy knows guys that are willing to find girls like that. Sometimes I’d deal with Klerke. Sometimes she would do it herself.’
‘Does Judy also know guys in Tijuana?’
Giorgio lowers his voice even though his phone is secure. ‘You’re thinking of the little girl. That didn’t have anything to do with Judy, or Nick, or me. That was something the cartel arranged. At Klerke’s request.’
‘Let me be sure I have it straight. If he’s in LA and got the itch for a dumpling, he’d call you or Judy and one of you would put him in touch with someone there. Except what we’re really talking about is a pimp.’ Billy hunts for the phrase he wants. It goes with dumplings, which isn’t surprising. ‘A chicken-rancher.’
‘Right. And if he’s on the east coast at his place in Montauk Point, he’d get the guy from New York. How many dates Klerke’s arranged since I left I don’t know.’
Dates, Billy thinks. ‘He actually gets concierge service?’
‘You could call it that. It’s what he pays for. Much money changes hands, Billy.’
Now comes the big question. ‘Does Judy ever call him? Like if she’s heard about someone who’d be in his sweet spot?’
‘It happens from time to time, sure. More often now that he’s reached an age when getting his noodle to stand up is a little more difficult.’
‘If you called Judy and said you had a girl he’d like, someone really special, would she pass it on?’
There’s silence while Giorgio thinks it over. Then he says, ‘She would. She’d smell a rat – her nose is what you’d call exquisite – but she’d do it. She hates that guy because of what he did in TJ and if she thought someone was trying to fuck him up, maybe even arrange a hit on him, she’d shout hooray. I feel about the same.’
Although it never stopped you doing biz with him, Billy thinks. Or her. ‘Okay. I’m going to call you back.’
‘I’ll be here. I have no place to go and don’t want to. I hated it at first but now I love it. Like alcoholics love sobriety once they get a hold on it, I guess.’
‘How much weight have you lost?’
‘A hundred and ten pounds,’ Giorgio says with perhaps justifiable pride. ‘I got another ninety to go.’
‘You sound good. Not so wheezy. Maybe if you lose the weight you can skip the operation.’
‘Nope. My liver’s shot and it’s not coming back. They’ve scheduled the op for two days after feliz navidad, so you better finish whatever business you have with me before then. The doc down here is so honest it’s brutal. He’s saying my odds are sixty-forty against coming through.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’ But I won’t bother praying for you, Billy thinks.
‘I hope you get that child-molesting perv.’
Who you worked for, Billy thinks again.
He doesn’t have to say it because Giorgio says it for him. ‘Sure, I carried his water. It was a lot of money, and I wanted to live.’
‘Understood.’ Billy thinks, But hell will still be waiting for you, Georgie. And if there is such a place, I’ll probably meet you there. We’ll have a drink. Brimstone on the rocks.
‘I always had an idea that stupid act of yours was a shuck.’
Billy says, ‘We’ll talk soon.’
‘Just don’t wait too long,’ Giorgio says.
3
It’s time to fill Alice in on what he has in mind, and Bucky deserves to be a part of the conversation. He tells them at the kitchen table, over coffee. When he finishes, he advises her to think about it. Alice says she doesn’t need to, she’s in.
Bucky gives Billy a reproachful look that says you turned her to the dark side after all, but he doesn’t say anything.
‘You said you got carded in bars, didn’t you?’ Billy asks her.
‘Yes, but I’ve only been in a couple. I only turned twenty-one the month before you … you know, met me.’
‘Never had a fake ID?’
‘Wouldn’t have worked,’ Bucky says. ‘I mean, look at her.’
They both look at her. Alice blushes and casts her eyes down.
‘How old would you say?’ Billy asks Bucky. ‘I mean, if you didn’t know?’
Bucky considers. ‘Eighteen. Nineteen at a stretch. Probably not twenty.’
Billy says to her, ‘How young could you make yourself look? If you really tried?’
The question interests her enough to forget she’s being studied – face and body – by two men. Of course the question interests her. At twenty-one she has undoubtedly considered how she might make herself look older and more sophisticated, but younger? Why would she?
‘I could get an elastic binder to make my boobs smaller, I guess. The kind that trans men wear.’ The flush returns. ‘I know they’re not that big anyway, but a binder would make me look, you know, almost flat. Isn’t that what Klerke likes? And my hair …’ She clasps it in one hand. ‘I could cut it. Not pixie short, but enough to put it in a little ponytail. Like a high school girl.’
‘Clothes?’
‘I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. No makeup, or not much. Maybe some pink bubblegummy lipstick …’
Billy says, ‘Do you think you could get down to fifteen?’
‘No way,’ Bucky says. ‘Seventeen, maybe.’
‘I might be able to do better than seventeen,’ Alice says, getting up. ‘Excuse me, I need a mirror.’
When she’s gone, Bucky leans across the table and speaks very quietly. ‘Don’t get her killed.’
‘I’m not planning on it.’
‘Plans go wrong.’
4
The next day Billy calls Giorgio again from the chilly summerhouse. It has occurred to him that he might not have to use Alice at all. He’s a sniper, after all, long-distance delivery his specialty. He keeps his eyes on the picture as they talk, half-expecting the hedge animals to move. They don’t.
He begins by asking Giorgio if he could put his sniper skills to work in the matter of Roger Klerke.
‘Not a chance. His place on Montauk Point is a forty-acre estate. Makes Nick’s place in Nevada look like a tenement.’
Billy is disappointed but not surprised. ‘That’s where he is now?’
‘That’s where he is. Calls the place Eos, after some Greek goddess. According to Page Six in the Post, he’ll stay there until just before Thanksgiving, then whistle up his Gulfstream and head back to LaLa Land for the holidays with his remaining son and heir.’
Lalafallujah, Billy thinks.
‘Will he have an entourage with him?’
Giorgio laughs and the laugh turns into a wheeze, so maybe he isn’t an entirely new man after all. ‘You mean like Nick does? No way. Klerke’s got a TV in every room, I hear, all on mute and all tuned to different channels. That’s his entourage.’
‘No security?’ Billy can’t believe it. Klerke is one of the richest men in America.
‘Guys on the estate, you mean? Not if he thinks you’re dead. And as far as he knows, you had no idea who paid for the Allen job anyway.’
‘He’d think I went to Nick’s place just to collect my payday.’
‘Right. I’m sure he has a security company on call if he needs them, and he’s probably got a panic button, but the only full-time guy is his assistant. William Petersen. You know, like the CSI guy?’
Billy has heard of the show but never watched it. ‘Is Petersen a bodyguard as well as an assistant?’