“Whatever. The only reason you can still take the subway when you visit New York is because your associate will whack anyone who makes a move on you. I think he'd even whack me if he had to, and I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy, all things considered. Well, most things considered.” He shook his head in bemusement. “Now what can I do for you, apart from letting you walk out of here alive?”
I hoped he didn't mean it. Al Z and I had had our run-ins in the past; at one point he'd given me twenty-four hours to live if I didn't find some money that had been stolen from under the nose of the underboss Tony Celli. I found the money, so I was still alive, but Tony Clean was dead. I had watched Al Z kill him. The only aspect of it that bothered Al Z was the cost of the bullet. A lot of Tony's men had died in Dark Hollow, due in no small part to the efforts of Louis and me, but Tony was the only made man to be killed, and since Al Z had killed him that took a lot of heat off all of us. We in turn had taken the heat off Al Z by returning the money Tony had stolen, with interest. My relationship with Al Z could have been used to define “complicated” in the dictionary.
Since the end of the Celli affair, Al Z had been keeping tabs on me. He knew enough about my business to learn that I was investigating the Fellowship and that, somehow, the man named Mr. Pudd was tied into its workings.
“As I recall,” I pointed out gently, “you invited me along.”
Al Z pretended to be taken aback. “So I did. It must have been a moment of weakness.” He immediately dispensed with the small talk. “I hear that you may be sticking your nose into the affairs of the Fellowship.”
“Why would that be of interest to you?”
“A lot of things are of interest to me. How did you enjoy meeting-Mr. Ragle?”
“He's a worried man. He thinks somebody is trying to kill him.”
“I fear Mr. Ragle may be about to suffer grievously for his art.”
He gestured at the two gunmen. They left the room and closed the door behind them.
Al Z stood and walked to the window, then stared down on the tourists shopping on Newbury, his basilisk glare flicking from face to face. Nobody died.
“I like this street,” he said, almost to himself. “I like its normality. I like the fact that I can step out onto the sidewalk and the people-around me are worrying about their mortgages, or the cost of coffee beans, or whether they just missed their train. I walk down there, and I feel normal by association.” He turned around to look at me. “You, on the other hand, you seem normal. You dress like any other mook. You don't look no better or no worse than a hundred other guys on the street. But you step in here, and you make me nervous. I swear, my fucking palms itch when I see you. Don't get me wrong; I respect you. I may even like you a little. But I see you and I get this sense of impending doom, like the fucking ceiling is about to cave in. The presence of your pet killers in Boston doesn't make me sleep any easier. I know you got a woman here, and I know too that you were eating with your friends at Anago last night. You had the beef, by the way.”
“It was good.”
“For thirty bucks, it better be real good. It better sing a fucking song while you chew on it. You talk business, or pleasure?”
“A little of both.”
He nodded. “That's what I thought. You want to know why I pointed Ragle toward you, why I'm interested in this man who calls himself Pudd? Maybe I figure, what can I do for Charlie Parker? Whose life can I turn to shit by letting you dig around in it?”
I waited. I wasn't sure where the conversation was going but the turn that it suddenly took surprised me.
“Or maybe it's something else,” he continued, and the tone of his voice changed. It now sounded a little querulous. It was an old man's voice. Al Z turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa, seating himself only a few feet away from me. His eyes, I thought, were haunted.
“You think one good action can make up for a lifetime of evil acts?” he asked.
“That's not for me to judge,” I replied.
“A diplomatic answer, but not the truth. You judge, Parker. That's what you do, and I respect you because you act on your judgment, just like me. We're two of a kind, you and I. Try again.”
I shrugged. “Maybe, if it's an act of genuine repentence, but I don't know how the scales of judgment are weighted.”
“You believe in salvation?”
“I hope for it.”
“Then you believe in reparation too. Reparation is the shadow cast by salvation.”
He folded his hands in his lap. They were very white and very clean, as if he spent hours each day scraping the dirt from the wrinkles and cracks on his skin.
“I'm getting old. I looked around at the graveside this morning and I saw dead men and women. Between them all, they had maybe a couple of years to live. Pretty soon, we're all going to be judged, and we'll all be found wanting. The best we have to hope for is mercy, and I don't believe you get mercy in the next life if you haven't shown it in this one.
“And I'm not a merciful man,” he concluded. “I have never been a merciful man.”
I waited, watching as he twisted the wedding ring on his finger. His wife had died three years before, and he had no children. I wondered if he had hopes of meeting her again, in some other life.
“Everybody deserves a chance to make amends for his life,” he said softly. “Nobody has the right to take that away.”
His eyes flicked back to the window, drawn by the light. “I know something of the Fellowship, and of the man it sends to do its business,” he said.
“Mr. Pudd.”
“You've met him?” There was surprise in Al Z's voice.
“I've met him.”
“Then your days may be numbered,” he said simply. “I know about him because it's my business to know. I don't like unpredictability, unless I figure that it's worth gambling on it to use for my own ends. That's why you're still alive. That's why I didn't kill you when you came looking for Tony Clean, and that's why I didn't kill you even after you and your friends took out most of Tony's crew in that snow-hole town two winters ago. What you wanted and what I wanted-” He moved his right hand, palm down, in a balancing motion. “Plus, you found the money, and that bought you your life.
“Now, maybe I figure that we could have another meeting of minds on Pudd. I don't care if he kills you, Parker. I'd miss you, sure. You brighten things up, you and your friends, but that's as far as it goes. Still, if you kill him, then that would be a good thing for everybody.”
“Why don't you kill him yourself?”
“Because he hasn't done anything to bring himself to my attention or that of my associates.” He leaned forward. “But that's like noticing a black widow in the corner of the room and figuring that you'll leave it alone because it hasn't bitten you yet.”
The spider analogy, I knew, was deliberate. Al Z was an interesting man.
“And there's more to this than Pudd. There are other people, people-in the shadows. They need to be flushed out too, but if I go against Pudd for no reason other than the fact that I think he's evil and dangerous-and that assumes that I could find him and that the people I sent after him could kill him, which I doubt-then the others in the background would move against me, and I'd be dead. I don't doubt it for one second. In fact, I think that the moment I made a move against Pudd, he'd kill me. That's how dangerous he is.”
“So you'll use me to flush him out.”
Al Z actually laughed. “Nobody uses you, I think, unless you want it. You're going after Pudd for your own reasons, and nobody in my organization will stand in your way. I've even tried to point you in the right direction with our pornographer friend. If you corner this man, and we can assist you in finishing him off without drawing any attention to ourselves, then we will. But my advice to you is to move everybody you care about out of his reach, because he will kill them, and then he will try to kill you.”