He killed his first man at eighteen. After all the frogs, the mice, the cats, the friendly little mutt he’d come across in the Bethany woods, he had to do a person. He had to know what it felt like. He bought a grey lightweight raincoat at a thrift store, matched it with an old cap and runners, and set out looking for a vagrant or drifter no one would miss. He walked around under an elevated section of the New York State Thruway for hours, carrying a bottle of cheap sherry in a brown paper bag, waiting for full dark, watching, scouting, noting who hung in groups and who kept to themselves. What they were drinking, how much and how fast. Who was big and who was small. Who had cuts and bruises on their faces from losing past fights. Who had them on their hands from winning.
Near midnight he found his man: a loner, about sixty, shuffling slowly along in boots that had no laces, heavy duffle bags weighing down both shoulders. The sole of the right boot flapped as he walked. Ricky stayed well back of him, swigging from the bottle every now and then, spitting most of it back down the bottle neck. He wanted to look like he was drinking but didn’t want to be drunk. Whatever happened, he wanted to remember every second.
Men gathered near pillars supporting the expressway, finding what shelter they could from the wind. Ricky saw shapes huddled under thin grey blankets that looked like they’d been stolen from shelters. Empty mickeys and bottles were strewn in the dirt, along with malt liquor cans and plastic rings from six-packs.
The old loner was a hundred yards ahead, kneeling against a fence that kept people off the Thruway, making up a little bed of discarded newspaper and cardboard. Then he sat and took a foam container out of a plastic bag and began shoving some kind of Italian food in his mouth with filthy fingers. Ricky gagged. This isn’t even a man, he told himself. It’s an animal, no different from the cats, the dog, even the brainless mouse he had dismembered. It eats like an animal. It smells like an animal. The closer Ricky got to this thing, the ranker its smell became, a mix of piss, puke, tomato sauce, more puke, tobacco and God knew what else.
Ricky let the paper bag slip down off his bottle as he walked past, and let his gait become more unsteady. If the guy was anything short of blind, he’d see a natural mark-a moonfaced kid looking drunk and vulnerable-with a nearly full bottle in his hand. If that didn’t get someone’s darker nature fired up, they plain didn’t have one.
Ricky Messina’s father was Sicilian but his mother was from the north and he had her colouring: dark blond hair and green eyes. His face was so round that kids used to call him Moon Face and Mooney before he gained some size and built it up hard in gymnasiums inside and outside prison. To this day people who didn’t know Ricky might look at his open face and think him pleasant. That suited Ricky just fine.
As Ricky stumbled along the fence, trying to look drunk, like he was barely keeping his balance, he heard footsteps fall in behind him, heard the flapping of a leather sole against the ground. Ricky let go of the fence and reached in for his knife: not a stiletto back then, but a steel hunting knife bought secondhand at a surplus store. The bottle in one hand, the knife in the other, Ricky leaned back against the fence. He felt ready. He kept his eyes half closed as if passing out, but through lowered lids he watched the animal approach, hefting a chunk of concrete in one filthy hand. Ricky had learned patience killing animals; he waited until the bum raised the rock to bring down on Ricky’s head and stepped deftly aside. The bum’s hand came smacking down on a fence rail and he dropped the rock with a hoarse lupine cry.
Ricky spun the bum around, the bum older than he’d looked from a distance, closer to seventy than sixty. His beard was grey except around the mouth, where nicotine had stained it orange. One eye was covered by a filmy cataract. “Drink?” Ricky asked, and smashed the bottle across his face. The bum howled again, louder, but Ricky knew no one would care. Breaking glass means nothing but bad news to drunks.
Ricky then made his only mistake of the night: he stuck the man in the throat. Arterial blood sprayed Ricky from forehead to sternum. Blood in his face, in his eyes, God, on his lips and in his mouth, seething with the animal’s vile germs. AIDS, Hep C, TB, they all flashed through Ricky’s mind as he pulled the knife out of the man and shoved him to the ground. In thirteen years since that night, Ricky had never made that mistake again. If he needed to kill quickly, he did it from behind. If he had time, he knew where to put the knife so it neither sprayed nor killed too quickly.
When the phone rang, it was a long-distance signaclass="underline" the man himself calling from Canada. Ricky let it ring once while he drained his Scotch; again while he prepared himself. Let the man vent, he told himself. Don’t take any bait. There’s too much keeping us together. He won’t blow you out of the water.
He answered it right after the third ring and didn’t speak again for three minutes.
Ricky had been listening to a terrific book-on-tape in the car lately: The Manager Inside Me. He thought it could really help a forward thinker like him define his goals more precisely and hack and slash his way toward them. While the man in Toronto was tearing strips off him every which way, Ricky stayed calm and detached. The Manager Inside Me had a chapter on that very subject, “Accepting Constructive Criticism.”
The man fed Ricky more shit than he ordinarily cared to swallow, but nothing truly damaging was said, and keeping The Manager Inside Me in mind helped: the shit still tasted like shit, but it went down easier somehow. When the rant finally wound down, Ricky calmly responded point by point. First, a brief strategic assessment of their situation to show he’d weighed both the risks and opportunities. Then a review of their agreed-upon business objectives. Finally, his plan to break new ground where the earth had been scorched.
To Ricky’s relief, the man agreed to everything. Yes, he warned Ricky that the time for mistakes was past but, before hanging up, complimented him on his strategic approach to damage control.
Man, Ricky loved that tape.
CHAPTER 9
Toronto: Tuesday, June 27
I know I’m in Israel but it looks like downtown Toronto. I’m with the Bar Kochba Infantry, patrolling the corner of Yonge and Dundas outside the Eaton Centre, where a busker in a sleeveless black denim vest drums on overturned food tubs and draws a funked-up head-bobbing crowd. I’m in desert cammies, cradling my Mikutzrar-a short-barrelled M-16 customized for urban combat-scanning the crowd for anyone whose clothing looks too bulky, too heavy for the heat.
Roni Galil, my sergeant, is next to me, asking for a smoke. I tell him I quit-he knows I quit, he listened to me whine about it long enough-then realize he means a joint, not a cigarette. I put my gun down on the sidewalk. I snap open a film case filled with a premixed batch of ground-up blond Lebanese hash and Marlboro tobacco that we always had good to go. I twist up a joint, but as I’m lighting it, a child in soccer shorts and tank top approaches. He has dark curly hair and looks just like his mother, which I somehow know even though she isn’t there. While I tousle the boy’s hair he picks up my M-16 and passes it back to someone in the crowd who passes it to someone else. When Roni takes the joint from me, I realize my weapon is gone. I have only my sidearm-not even the Sig Sauer they give to officers, just a standard 9-millimetre Beretta.
I want my M-gun back. I punch the boy hard in the face. His nose breaks and he gags as blood streams into his throat. I push my way through the crowd but everyone starts pushing back, kicking at my feet, trying to knock them out from under me. If I go down I’ll never get up again, they’ll fucking kick me to death. I plant my legs and clutch at their clothing, bunch it in my fists like a man trying to keep his head above water. I call for Roni but he’s sharing the joint with people around him. He can’t hear me. He’s not even offering it to me, the shit. No one can hear me now, not above the screaming-my screaming and the screams of the mob and the boy with the broken nose.