The Drizzler took this opening to do some more drizzling. “I agree with you, and that’s exactly why it makes so much sense to move our shipping department down to Flor—”
The Spitter cut the Drizzler right off, using a word with a double- P,the Spitter’s second-deadliest consonant. “That’s fucking preposterous!” spat the Spitter. “That whole fucking concept! I have no time for this shit. I gotta get some fucking shoes made or else we’ll be out of fucking business!” With that, the Spitter walked out of the office and slammed the door behind him.
Just then the phone beeped. “Todd Garret’s on line one.”
I rolled my eyes at Steve, then I said, “Tell him I’m in a meeting, Janet. I’ll call him back.”
Janet, the insolent one: “ ObviouslyI told him you’re in a meeting, but he said it’s urgent. He needs to speak to you right now.”
I shook my head in disgust and let out a great sigh. What could be so important with Todd Garret—unless, of course, he had managed to get his hands on some Real Reals! I picked up the phone and said in a friendly yet somewhat annoyed tone, “Hey, Todd, what’s going on, buddy?”
“Well,” replied Todd, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but some guy named Agent Coleman just left my house and told me that Carolyn is about to get thrown in jail.”
With a sinking heart: “For what? What did Carolyn do?”
I felt the world crash down on me when Todd said, “Did you know that your Swiss banker is in jail and he’s cooperating against you?”
I clenched my ass cheeks for all they were worth and said, “I’ll be there in an hour.”
Like its owner, Todd’s two-bedroom apartment was mean-looking. From top to bottom, the whole place was black, not an ounce of color anywhere. We were sitting in the living room, which was completely devoid of plant life. All I could see was black leather and chrome.
Todd was sitting across from me, as Carolyn paced back and forth on a black shag carpet, teetering atop some very high heels. Todd said to me, “It goes without saying that Carolyn and I will never cooperate against you, so don’t even worry about that.” He looked up at the pacing Swiss Bombshell and said, “Right, Carolyn?”
Carolyn nodded nervously and kept on pacing. Apparently Todd found that annoying. “Will you stop pacing!” he snarled. “You’re driving me fucking crazy. I’m gonna smack you if you don’t sit down!”
“Oh, fahakyou, Tahad!” croaked the Bombshell. “This no laughing business. I have two kids, in case you forget. It is all because of that stupid pistol you carry.”
Even now, on the day of my doom, these two maniacs were determined to kill each other. “Will you two please stop?” I said, forcing a smile. “I don’t understand what Todd’s gun charge has to do with Saurel getting indicted.”
“Don’t listen to her,” muttered Todd. “She’s a fucking idiot. What she’s trying to say is that Coleman found out what happened in the shopping center, and now he’s telling the Queens District Attorney not to plea-bargain my case. A few months ago they were offering me probation, and now they’re telling me I gotta do three years unless I cooperate with the FBI. Personally, I couldn’t give a shit about that, and if I gotta go to jail I gotta go to jail. The problem is my idiot wife, who decided to strike up a friendship with your Swiss banker instead of just dropping off the money and not saying a word like she was supposed to. But, nooooo,she couldn’t resist having lunch with the fuck and then exchanging phone numbers with him. For all I know she probably fucked him.”
“You know,” said a rather guilty-looking Bombshell, in her white patent leather go-to-hell pumps, “you got nerves upon nerves, dog-man! Who be you to throw stones in my direction? You don’t think I know what you do with that steel-cage dancer from Rio?” With that, the Swiss Bombshell looked me directly in the eye and said, “Do you believes this jealous man? Will you please tell Tahadthat Jean Jacquesnot like that? He is old banker, not ladies’ man. Right, Jordan?” And she stared at me with blazing blue eyes and a clenched jaw.
An old banker? Jean Jacques? Jesus Christ—what a tragic turn of events! Had the Swiss Bombshell fucked my Swiss banker? Unreal! If she had just dropped off the money like she was supposed to, then Saurel wouldn’t have even known who she was! But, no, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and, as a result, Coleman was now connecting all the dots—figuring out that Todd’s arrest in the Bay Terrace Shopping Center had nothing to do with a drug deal but with the smuggled millions of dollars to Switzerland.
“Well,” I said innocently, “I wouldn’t exactly characterize Saurel as an old man, but he’s not the sort of guy who’d have an affair with another man’s wife. I mean, he’s married himself, and he never really struck me as being that way.”
Apparently they both took that as a victory. Carolyn blurted out, “You see, dog-man, he is not like that. He is—”
But Todd cut her right off: “So why the fuck did you say he’s an old man, then, you lying sack of shit? Why lie if you have nothing to hide, huh? Why, I…”
As Todd and Carolyn went about ripping each other’s lungs out, I tuned out and wondered if there was any way out of this mess. It was time for desperate measures; it was time to call my trusted accountant Dennis Gaito, aka the Chef. I would offer him my humblest apology for having done all this behind his back. No, I had never actually told the Chef that I had accounts in Switzerland. There was no choice now but to come clean and seek his counsel.
“…and what will we do for money now?” asked the Swiss Bombshell. “This Agent Coleman watch you like bird now”— Did she mean hawk?—“so you can no more sell your drugs. We will starve now for sure!” With that, the soon-to-be starving Swiss Bombshell—along with her $40,000 Patek Philippe watch, her $25,000 diamond-and-ruby necklace, and her $5,000 clothing ensemble—sat down in a black leather chair. Then she put her head in her hands and began to shake her head back and forth.
How very ironic that, at the end of the day, it was the Swiss Bombshell, with her bastardized English and gigantic boobs, who’d finally cut through all the bullshit and distilled things down to their very essence—it all came down to buying their silence. And that was fine with me; in fact, I had a sneaky suspicion it was fine with them too. After all, the two of them now had a pair of first-class tickets on the gravy train, and they would be good for many years to come. And if somewhere along the line the heat in the kitchen grew too hot, they could always apply for exit visas downtown, at the New York Field Office of the FBI, where Agent Coleman would be waiting for them with open arms and a smile.
That evening, in my basement in Old Brookville, Long Island, I was sitting on the wraparound couch with the Chef, playing a little-known game called Can You Top This Bullshit Story. The rules of the game were simple: The contestant spewing out the bullshit would try to make his story as airtight as possible, while the person listening to the bullshit would try to poke holes in it. In order to achieve victory, one of the contestants had to come up with a bullshit story that was so airtight that the other contestant couldn’t poke a hole in it. And since the Chef and I were Jedi Masters of unadulterated bullshit, it was pretty obvious that if one of us could stump the other, then we could also stump Agent Coleman.