Killing Time, or: A Free Short Story

A year and a half ago I published DEVILS YOU KNOW, a collection of short stories which I had written over a period of twenty-six years, i.e. between 1990 and 2016. In deciding what stories to include and what to leave out, I had to make some tough choices. I did not want DEVILS to be dominated by any one genre or sub-genre of fiction, but rather by the greater theme of how many ways the dark side of human nature can manifest itself in we troubled homo sapiens. Some of the stories were historical or dystopian fiction, others horror or comedy of the blackest type. And as I had already chosen two crime stories ("Pleas and Thank-Yous" and "Unfinished Business") I decided not to put in a third. As a result, the following story, "Killing Time," has never before seen the light of day. I've always considered that a shame, and since my work schedule has not allowed me to devote the time I wish to this blog of late -- it's supposed to be a weekly and has deteriorated into more of a monthly -- I decided this evening that, rather than do my taxes, I'd format the story and include it here for your reading pleasure (or pain). Those of you who have read my novel CAGE LIFE (or its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN) will recognize a character or two, but knowledge of those books is not necessary: this is a stand-alone story which exists in its own universe. In point of fact, for those of you who are interested in such things, this story predates my novels by a good dozen years or more. It was one of the seeds which ultimately lead me to quit my career in law-enforcement and begin writing full time. For that reason alone it will always have a special place in my heart. So read, enjoy, and feel no guilt that I blew off going to my accountant to entertain you for free. The taxes can wait. As Herman Wouk once remarked, for bad news there is always time.

We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"

He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.

"Are you sure?"

He hesitated.

"It's no thing," I said.

He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."

I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."

Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.

"Salud," I said.

He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.

“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.

He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.

"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”

He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.

"What'd you say?"

He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."

"Why?"

He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."

I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"

He shrugged, took another sip.

"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."

He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."

"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"

"Longer."

"That's a long fuckin' time."

"Yeah."

"An' you never saw it coming?"

"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"

"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."

He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."

Grunt.

"What's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"

He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"

"Take the bottle."

He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."

"How?"

"Why you want to know?"

"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."

He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."

"Okay."

"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"

My eyebrows shot up.

"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.

"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'

"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"

He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.

"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."

"Handy."

"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."

He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."

"Ain't that some shit," I said.

He nodded.

"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."

"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.

"Yeah."

"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."

"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"

"Capitol."

"Or Columbia."

"Yeah."

"Tell me somethin' else," I said.

He leaned back on the couch.

"What happened with you an' Gino?"

I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."

"He's got an arm, all right."

"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"

"Save it."

We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."

"Maybe."

"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"

"I heard a gun go off."

"That ain't what I axed you."

"No. Okay? No."

He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."

He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.

"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."

The desk phone rang. We both jumped.

I picked it up. "Hello?"

"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"

"He's here."

"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"

"No. I didn't--"

"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"

Click.

I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."

For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.

But that didn't make it any easier.

Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.

Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.

"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"

"As soon as I talked to you."

"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."

"Sorry, Gino."

"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.

I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"

"Hear what?"

"Is there a beef, or what?"

Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."

I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.

I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"

"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."

"You're not gonna--"

"No, I'm not. You are."

"Gino, I can't--"

"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."

"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."

"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"

"I can't, man. Please."

He looked at me in disgust.

"I just can't."

"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."

We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"

"Killing time," I said.

"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."

"Sorry, Gene."

He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."

"Pizza okay?"

"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."

Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.

I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.

But it never got any easier.

I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.

"It figures," I muttered.

"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."

"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."