"Hey, this one's much nicer. We'll take this."
There came the unmistakable sound of someone bouncing up and down on my bed. Louis looked at me.
"Might need that gun after all," he said. Then he shrugged and followed the sound of the springs.
When I eventually got them out of my bedroom and had arranged to have some extra furniture, including a bed, taken out of the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road and delivered to the house, we sat around the kitchen table and I waited for them to tell me why they were here. It had begun to rain: hard, cold drops that spoke of the coming of snow.
"We're your guardian angels," said Angel.
"Why doesn't that fill me with a sense of blessing?" I replied.
"Or maybe we just heard that this is the place to be," continued Angel. "Anybody who's anybody is here right now. You got your Tony Celli, you got your feds, you got your local shit-kickers, you got your dead Asians. Shit, this place is like the UN with guns."
"What do you know?" I asked.
"We know that you've been pissing people off already," he replied. "What happened to your face?"
"Guy with a harelip tried to educate me with a cattle prod, then rearranged my hairline with his shoe."
"That's Mifflin," said Louis. "He have another guy with him, looked like someone dropped a safe on his head and the safe lost?"
"Yeah," I said. "He didn't kick me, though."
"That's 'cause the message probably got halfway from his brain to his foot then forgot where it was going. His name's Berendt. He's so dumb he makes dodos look smart. Tony Clean was with them?" While he spoke, he balanced one of my carving knives on the tip of his index finger and amused himself by tossing it in the air and catching it by the handle. It was a pretty neat trick. If the circus came to town, he was a shoo-in.
"They were staying at the Regency," I said. "I got to visit Tony's room."
"Was it nice?" asked Angel, pointedly running a hand along the underside of the table and examining the accumulated dust on the tips of his fingers.
"Yeah, pretty nice, apart from the kicks in the head and the electric shocks."
"Fuck him. We should make him stay here. The squalor would put him back in touch with his roots."
"You criticize my house again, you can sleep in the yard."
"Probably be cleaner," he muttered. "And warmer."
Louis tapped a long, slim finger gently on the tabletop. "Hear there's a lot of money got misdirected around these parts. A lot of money."
"Yeah, so I gather."
"Any idea where it is?"
"Maybe. I think it's with a guy called Billy Purdue."
"That's what I hear too."
"From Tony Celli's end?"
"Disaffected employees. They figure this Billy Purdue's so dead, someone should name a cemetery after him."
I told them about the deaths of Rita and Donald. I noticed Angel and Louis exchange a glance and I knew that there was more to come.
"Billy Purdue take out Tony's men?" asked Angel.
"Two of them, at least. Assuming he's the one who took the money, and that's what Tony Celli and the law have assumed."
Louis stood and carefully washed his mug. "Tony's in trouble," he said at last. "Got involved in some deal on Wall Street that fell through." I had heard stories that the Italians had moved into Wall Street, establishing paper companies and getting crooked brokers to float them and rip off investors. There was a lot of money to be made if it was done right.
"Tony screwed up," continued Louis, "and now you got a guy whose days are numbered in single figures."
"How bad is it?"
Louis placed the mug upside down to drain, then leaned against the sink. "You know what PERLS is?"
"PERLS are," I corrected him, incorrectly as it turned out. "Something found in an oyster?"
"Easy to know you never had no money to invest," said Louis. "PERLS stands for Principal Exchange Rate Linked Security. It's a structured note, a kind of bond sold by investment banks. It's packaged to look safe, except it's risky as sex with a shark. Basically, the buyer bets a certain amount of money and the return is based on the changes in the exchange rate of a number of different currencies. It's a formula, and if things go right, you can make a killing."
I always found it fascinating that Louis could drop the monosyllabic black gunman shtick if the subject required it, but I didn't point it out to him.
"So Tony Celli thinks he's a financial wizard, and some people in Boston believe him," he went on. "He takes care of laundering, passes a lot of money through offshore banks and paper companies, until it finds its way back into the right accounts. He deals with the accountants, but he's also the first point of contact for any cash. He's like the thinnest part of an hourglass: everything has to go through him to get to somewhere else. And sometimes, Tony makes investments on the side using other people's money, or makes a little on currency exchanges, and keeps what he makes. No one cares, long as he doesn't get too greedy."
"Let me guess," I interrupted. "Tony got too greedy."
Louis nodded. "Tony's tired of being an Indian and now he wants to be a chief. He figures he needs money to do that, more than he's got. So he gets talking to some derivatives salesman who doesn't have a fucking clue who Tony is beyond the fact that hea wop in a striped shirt with money to spend, because Tony is trying to keep his dealings as low-key as possible. He convinces Tony to buy a variation on these PERLS, linked to the difference between the value of some Southeast Asian currencies and a basket of other currencies-dollars, Swiss francs, German marks, I heard-and pockets the commission. The thing is so dangerous it should be ticking, but Tony buys in for one and a half million dollars, most of which isn't his own money, because there are midwestern insurance companies and pension funds in on the deal too and Tony figures wrongly that they're too conservative to bet on a risky hand. It's purely a short-term investment, and Tony figures he'll have his money made before anybody notices he's holding onto the cash for longer than usual."
"So what happened?"
"You read the papers. The yen plummets, banks fail, the whole economy of Southeast Asia starts to come unstuck.
The value of Tony's bonds falls by 95 percent in forty-eight hours, and his life expectancy falls by roughly the same amount. Tony sends some people to look for the salesman and they find him in Zip City down on 18th Street, laughing about how he ripped some guy's face off. That's what these salesmen call it when they sell someone an exploding bond."
And with those words, according to Louis, the salesman had signed his own death warrant. He was taken when he went to the bathroom, brought to a basement in Queens and tied to a chair. Then Tony came in, stuck his fingers in the soft flesh beneath the guychin, and started to pull. It took him less than two minutes to tear the guy's face apart, then they put him in a car and beat him to death in some woods upstate.
Louis picked up the knife again, gave it a couple of extra spins for good luck, then put it back in its wooden block. There was no blood on his fingertip, despite the pressure of the knifepoint. "So Tony's in the hole for the cash, and some people higher up start getting concerned about the length of time it's taking for their money to reach them. Then Tony gets lucky: a mook in Toronto, who owes Tony big time, tells him about this old Cambodian guy living the quiet life in Hamilton, south of the city. It seems the old man was Khmer Rouge, used to be a deputy director in the Tuol Seng camp in Phnom Penh."
I had heard of Tuol Seng. It had once been a school in the Cambodian capital, but was converted into a place of torture and execution by the Khmer Rouge when they took over the country. Tuol Seng had been run by the big-eared camp director known as Comrade Deuch, who had used whips, chains, poisonous reptiles and water to torture and kill maybe sixteen thousand people, including Westerners who strayed too close to the Cambodian coast.