This is all true; Zebulon Kronski is a douche cosmetic surgeon who sees himself as a player. And if we met under normal circumstances I can imagine me leaving the room with clenched fists so I wouldn’t punch his lights out, but we met when I was with the UN peacekeepers in the Lebanon during wartime and under sea-trench levels of pressure, so we’re bonded by blood and shrapnel. Sometimes having a wartime friend is the only way to make it through peacetime. The fact that we were on opposite sides in the Middle East doesn’t matter, we’re both too old to have any faith in sides. I put my faith in people nowadays. And not too many of them either.
And technically, I wasn’t on a side. I was in the middle.
I wait till Gloria Estefan has finished the bar then swish my iPhone.
“Hello,” I say, adhering to the Irish maxim of not volunteering information.
“Top of the morning to you, Sergeant,” says Dr. Zebulon Kronski, ear-shagging me with his Hollywood Irish accent.
“Morning, Zeb,” I reply wearily and warily.
I have an army buddy who would not even admit that it was morning over the phone in case it would help triangulate his position.
“You been practicing that accent?” I ask him. “It’s good.”
“Really?”
“No, not really, you dick. That accent is so bad it’s racist.”
This is a bit of a cheap shot as Zebulon has just begun taking acting classes and fancies himself a character actor.
I got the quirk thing going on, he once confided after a bottle of something illegal from the Everglades that may or may not have contained Alligator penis. A little bit Jeff Goldblum and a slice of that guy Monk. Know what I mean? I once did a walk-on in CSI some-fucking-city-or-other. Director said I had an interesting face.
Interesting face? Sing it, brother.
Like a normal face except squashed between two sheets of plate glass. Then again, my own face ain’t nothing to write home about. I’ve had the hard-man scowl pasted on for so long that the wind changed and it stuck.
Zeb is not impressed by my racist crack and so comes back strong, breaking some heavy news without any sugarcoating.
“Mrs. Madden died, Dan. We are überfucked.”
Zeb and I both appreciate the term über, so in the era of casual awesomes and total generational confusion over the terms sick, bad, wicked and radical, we reserve über for verbs that really deserve it.
My heart stutters and the phone seems heavier than a brick. I shouldn’t have even contemplated contentment; this is what happens.
Mrs. Madden dead? Already?
This is not right. I don’t have any wiggle room in my life for trouble right now. My issues are packed tighter than shells in a magazine.
She cannot be dead.
“Bullshit,” I say, but it’s just a stall to give my heart a chance to settle back into a rhythm.
“No bullshit, Irish,” says Zeb. “I said über. You don’t fuck with über, that’s our code.”
Generally I would not be broken up when a lady that I did not personally know totters off her coil, even one from Ireland, but my own welfare is very dependent on Mrs. Madden being alive enough to call her son once a week.
Here’s what it is: Mike Madden, the beloved son, is the big fish in our small pond, and by big fish I mean the most vicious sonofan-A-hole gangster in our quiet burg. Mike runs all the usuals from the Brass Ring club on Cloisters’ strip. He’s got maybe a dozen hooligans with too many weapons and too few high-school diplomas among them, all desperate to laugh at Irish Mike’s jokes and put the hurt on anyone throwing a monkey wrench in the Madden machine. It’s laughable really, this faux Celtic dick with his Oirish lilt straight outta The Quiet Man. I came across a lotta guys like him in the corps; local warlords with delusions of power, confusing brawn with brain, but they never held on to the crown for long. The next hard man was always coming down the pipe with a chip on his shoulder and an A-K under his jacket. But Mike fell into a sweet setup here in Cloisters, because it’s too minor league for any self-respecting darksider to throw any bodies at it. Mike ain’t as cash rich as other bosses, but he ain’t fighting a turf war every second week neither. Plus Mike can speechify from morning to night and no one so much as whispers, oh for fuck sake.
Nobody but me.
Me and Mike had a tête-à-tête last year over a little fatal friction I had with his lieutenant. Zeb was in the mix too, which rubbed all participants the wrong way. The upshot being that I was forced to ask one of my Irish army buddies to make like an armed-to-the-teeth gnome in Mrs. Madden’s garden back in Ballyvaloo, just to ensure Zeb and I kept breathing Essex County air.
I felt a part of my soul wither when I threatened a guy’s mother. It was about as low as I’ve ever crawled but I couldn’t see any other way clear. Every day since I struck that deal I have honestly believed that part of the fallout from dealing with the devil is that you re-make yourself in his image. There was a time when threatening a guy’s mother was not on the table no matter what the circumstances, especially considering what my own mom went through.
I would never have made good on that threat, I tell myself daily. I am not that bad.
Maybe I can claw my way back to how I used to be. Maybe with Sofia lying beside me in bed, her hair backlit to a golden nimbus by the morning sun.
Listen to me. I sound like Celine Dion on a boat.
Anyhow . . .
Irish Mike Madden was only promising not to butcher Zebulon and me so long as his mom was alive, or rather he promised to kill us just as soon as his mom passed away. The nuts and bolts aren’t important as such. Basically, now that his mom is gone, this guy Mike has Zeb and me strapped over a barrel with our pants down and half a pint of K-Y Jelly wobbling on his palm.
Metaphorical jelly.
I hope.
I am in two minds about this latest development. I feel the familiar brain fatigue that comes with being tossed once more into the cauldron of combat, but also I am the tiniest bit relieved that Mrs. Madden died and I didn’t have anything to do with it. At least I hope I didn’t have anything to do with it. I better call my gnome when I get a minute, because the ex-army guy I had watching Mrs. Madden is known for being a little pre-emptive. Maybe Corporal Tommy Fletcher got fed up keeping an eye out.
I hear Zeb in my ear.
“Yo, D-man? You passed out on the sidewalk?”
Yo? Zeb loves his adopted culture. He called me bee-yatch last week and I had to knuckle him quite seriously on the forehead.
“Yeah. I’m here. Just had the wind knocked out of my sails a bit with that news.”
“Ah, Jaysus. We’re not pushin’ up the daisies just yet.”
“So what happened to the mother? Natural causes, was it?”
I hope to Christ it was natural causes.
“Some of it was natural,” says Zeb, with titillating vagueness.
I gotta admit, for a long time I thought titillating meant something else.
“What do you mean, some if it?”
“Well, the snow and the lightning.”
“Go on. Tell me, I know you’re dying to.”
“I wish you had FaceTime. This is a hard one to do justice without video.”
Zeb is really testing me now. I shouldn’t have disrespected his acting skills.
“Zeb. Lay it out.”
“Lay it out? Who the fuck are you? Shaft?”
I shout into the phone’s speaker. “What happened to the bloody mother?”
I have lost it and so Zeb wins.
“Calm down already, Irish. What the hell?”
Zeb is all about the games. His favorite one is pushing my buttons, but I have some game myself. The army psychiatrist taught me a little about manipulation, which wasn’t really on the lesson plan but he thought it might come in handy seeing as I was moving to NYC.