EPILOGUE—IFS AND MAYBES

It was a single column on page twelve of the paper:

BODY IDENTIFIED

A week earlier I’m not sure I’d have seen it. I would have been too busy puking my guts up after chemo or too tired to lift my head. I was on the cancer diet, all right. Sometimes I think it wasn’t so much that I was nauseous all the time—a lot of the time, yes, but not always—as much as I was so exhausted that I barely had the energy to eat. Don’t think for a second there weren’t moments I didn’t wish that Gus or the Bulgarian had just shoved me out of the van and put one in my ear. As I anticipated, death wasn’t the tough part. It was the dying that was murder.

I’d gone up to Vermont on the Tuesday before the wedding, but plenty had happened in the interim. Nick Roussis ignored his attorney’s advice and spoke to federal prosecutors, the cops, and the Brooklyn DA for nearly twelve hours straight. From a pragmatic standpoint, it was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. From a moral standpoint, it was the only thing to do. Nick could have used his knowledge of the Bulgarian crime gangs as a bargaining chip to reduce his sentence or as an entrée into witness protection, but soul cleansing isn’t about wheeling and dealing.

The story of the collapse of the Roussis family business into the abyss of organized crime was an old and painfully familiar one. Gus, a junkie and a gambler, had made some bad investments with company funds and had helped himself to other assets. He’d done such a good job of covering his tracks—addicts are expert at covering tracks—that by the time the accountants caught wind of it, it was too late. The business was fucked. Gus vowed to make it right and to save the family. Of course, trusting a gambler and a junkie to save the family business was tantamount to trusting Hitler to be the Shabbos goy. What Gus Roussis did was borrow money, a lot of money, from the people who supplied him with junk and who held his markers.

Like I said, it’s an old story. The Bulgarians, who were looking for a foothold in New York City, knew Gus would never be able to keep up with the payments even at zero percent interest. With the vig they added to the loan, forget it. Within months, the wolves were at Gus and Nicky’s door and the choice was a very simple one: immediately pay the loan in full, let the Bulgarians launder money through the business and use the restaurants as distribution points, or watch the Bulgarians murder their families. On the Monday before I left for New England, I got a call from Fuqua that Nicky wanted to see me.

He was being held in a high-security section of the Brooklyn House of Detention, the Brooklyn Tombs as we called it when I was on the job. It was on Atlantic Avenue, within walking distance of both Bordeaux in Brooklyn and of the PI office at 40 Court Street that I once shared with Carmella, Brian Doyle, and Devo.

I talked into the cubicle phone. “Hey, Nicky.”

He could barely look at me through the Plexiglas, a guard standing a few feet over his right shoulder. He picked up the phone. “Thanks for comin’.”

“You did the right thing by talking, but how is your family?”

“They’re safe for now.” Tears rolled down his face. We both knew what for now meant. “If my testimony ends up convicting enough of them, we’ll get into the program. But these guys, Moe, they ain’t like the old Five Families. They will never stop looking for me and they’ll do anything it takes for payback.”

I didn’t think this was a good avenue for either of us to explore. “What did you want to see me about, Nick?”

“Those things you said about Gus being a coward, they’re not true.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to tell you what happened, really. The Bulgarians used to hide their heroin in plastic-wrapped bricks inside sacks of flour. The night that women, that Alta, was killed, she parked right by the loading dock. Gus was helping one of the Bulgarians off-load flour and he slipped. He screamed when he fell and she came over to see if anyone needed first aid. The sack of flour had busted open and there were four bricks of heroin laying there in the flour. She took off. The Bulgarian pulled his piece, but Gus grabbed his arm. Then the guy turned it on Gus and told him it was him or her. If only she had run for her car, she mighta had a chance. See, Moe, Gus had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice. Not always a good one, but there’s always a choice.”

He shook his head in denial. “You don’t understand. He had no choice.”

“Why’d you even get involved with these guys? You had to know that letting Gus try to fix things was gonna get you fucked tenfold.”

“You said it yourself when you came to the Grotto that first day. How you and your brother had done some stuff to keep your business afloat, stuff you weren’t real proud of. Remember, you said that business was a strange kinda creature, a predator and prey animal and scavenger all at once? To keep it going, you said, you had to use what worked even if you had to hold your nose while you did it.”

“I didn’t mean it literally, Nicky.”

“If you had my brother instead of yours and the Bulgarians knockin’ at your door, you’d see it that way.”

That’s where I wanted to leave it. I moved to put the intercom phone back in its cradle.

“I saved your life twice, Moe. Don’t you think you owe me at least a goodbye?”

“Twice?”

“Yeah, I shot Iliya, but that was as much for me and the hell they put my family through as for you. See, once the Bulgarians found out you were snooping around about Conseco’s murder, they were gonna just kill you. Instead I got them to let you talk to Joey Fortuna to throw you off the trail. I figured you’d give up sooner or later and they would leave you alone.”

“Thanks, Nick, but they tried to kill me anyway, tried running me off the Belt Parkway a few days ago.”

He laughed at that. “You don’t know the Bulgarians, Moe. They don’t go in for shit like that. They don’t like ifs and maybes. When they want to kill you, they shoot you or hack you up or blow you up. They don’t run you off the road. Whoever did that is still out there. Looks like that makes two of us who have to watch our backs.”

And that was how we left it.

I called Carmella immediately after getting out of the B-Tombs to explain exactly how Alta had died, who had done it, and why. The irony of it wasn’t lost on her. She thanked me for everything. I asked if she had gotten in touch with Kristen Jo Winston before she left Brooklyn for home. She said she hadn’t, that she couldn’t be somebody else. The irony in that wasn’t lost on me. She asked me to pass on her best wishes to Sarah at the wedding and I said I would. I didn’t tell her I was sick. Suddenly, I didn’t want her sympathy. I no longer wanted anything she had to give. There was a time when we both would have had so much much more to say, but that was ancient history now.

The wedding was amazing. I don’t think I even enjoyed my own wedding to Katy that much. Life is pretty fucking amazing when you take the time to actually let it in and wash over you. I danced like a madman with Pam, with Sarah, with my brother Aaron and my sister-in-law Cindy, with my little sister Miriam, with my nieces and nephews, with Paul’s mom, with his dad, with Fuqua. At the last moment I’d added him to the guest list and he accepted. Paul’s parents didn’t say boo. They weren’t about to say no to the man who had saved my life. For how long was anybody’s guess. Not once during the whole day was I tempted to tell Sarah about my health. The dark realities in our lives catch up to all of us and they didn’t need an assist from me. My daughter would find out about me soon enough. When she got home from her honeymoon, the surgery would be over and then we would all deal with things from there.

Pam had her own notions on the subject. After we threw the rice and waved goodbye to the limo, Pam took me by the arm and marched me to a quiet corner of the country club.

“You’re sick, Moe, aren’t you?”

I didn’t bother denying it. “How’d’ya know?”

“You mean other than the fact that you constantly seem distracted, that you’re too pale and thin, and that you only pretend to drink wine when we’re together?”

“Other than that, yeah.”

“It was something you said when we were in the car following Esme after she picked up the money at 79th Street. You said there wasn’t enough time for another time. I asked you what that meant and you ignored me, but I didn’t forget.”

“It’s bad,” I said.

“I figured. Let’s get back to my place and talk about it when we come up for air.”

She hasn’t left my side since.

On the strength of his arrest of Nick Roussis and for playing a part in breaking up a major drug ring, Fuqua is scheduled to get the bump to detective first and will receive a high departmental honor for saving my worthless ass. His instincts were right. It was better to feed his ambition with accomplishment than leverage. I’m very proud of him for that and I’m almost positive Larry Mac would have been too.

Sarah or Paul or both come down every weekend to visit and Klaus has taken over my responsibilities at the stores. My brother comes to visit, but he won’t talk to me. Cindy says he’s furious with me for not telling him that I was sick, but I know the truth. He’s frightened I’ll abandon him. So he sits across from me when he comes and doesn’t say a word. That’s okay. I hope his anger is strong enough to keep us both alive. Fuqua comes by and so does Flannery. Sometimes they visit together. I enjoy watching them drink in front of me. The deal is that when my treatments are over, they’re taking me to Nathan’s. I mean to hold them to it.

My oncologist says he’s cautiously optimistic, whatever the fuck that means. Talk about hedging your bets! Unlike the Bulgarians he seems perfectly comfortable with ifs and maybes.

The body I read about in the paper that morning was identified as Esmeralda Marie Sutanto, twenty-two years old, of Long Island City, New York. She had been found a few days earlier by a lost hiker in a state park in Orange County. Although the body wasn’t in the best of shape, there were signs she had been tortured before being suffocated. The cops weren’t very specific, but Fuqua had all the details when he called me later in the day.

“They used a black latex mask to suffocate her,” he said. “It was designed so that one might cut off the air supply to the wearer. From the shape of her, they did her a favor by killing her. Her murderer was very angry with her. The upstate authorities are putting it down to a sexual assault and homicide.”

“You sound unconvinced.”

“The homicide did not happen where the body was found, yet the murderer left Esme’s suitcase with her body.”

“So.”

“I have gone over the inventory of the things in the suitcase. They were mismatched. It was as if someone else packed the bag for Esme to make it appear as if she had left her apartment in a rush.”

Even in my frail state, I could read between the lines. I had no part in contacting the women Esme and Tillman had raped and blackmailed. Natasha said she would handle that. But none of us, not Pam nor Natasha nor Fuqua nor Devo nor I believed that simply getting Esme out of town would be the end of it. Devo said it to me straight, that there were no guarantees the videos wouldn’t resurface, that there were billions of hiding places in cyberspace and that any half-assed kid could embed videos in places no one would think to look. Basically, we’d all chosen to ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. What Fuqua was saying was that one of us had decided not to it ignore it at all.

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“Do?” he puzzled. “I will do nothing.”

“I thought all victims were equal in murder.”

“Not all victims,” he said. “Not all. It is not my job to increase the pain in the world. It is my job to stop it.”

I let Fuqua hold on to that myth because as long as humans walked the earth, the pain would be there and we would go on doing what we could not help but do: inflict pain on one another as easily as we breathed. People can change, but they cannot change their essential natures. We were hurt machines and whether we evolved into them or God made us that way seemed beside the point.

THE END