We’re in the kitchen, through it, heading out the back and I haven’t let go of Risina’s arm as I clench it in a vise grip. I only had a split second to react. I heard a sound like metal snapping and the whirr of a tension line releasing, all in the span of a crack of lightning, and as the scaffolding started to collapse, I shot my hand out, a miracle lunge, closed my fingers around Risina’s arm and jerked her back into the cafe only a second before she would have been crushed. I didn’t have time to warn Smoke, couldn’t have shouted if I’d wanted to. The only thing I had time to do was watch him take the brunt of it, five stories of structure raining down on top of him like a machine press.
Accidents don’t exist in this business.
Risina’s natural instinct was to look back as the realization of what happened hit her. She wanted to help, to see if anyone could be rescued, to see if anyone was hurt but alive, but she’s new to this world and I have to keep her moving, even if it means I bruise her arm because I will not let go.
Everyone hurries toward the front of the restaurant while we rush out the back.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she’s saying but I’m not waiting, not allowing her to break stride. A half block down the alley I finally loosen my grip and she practically falls over as she jerks her arm away.
“What’re you doing?” she shouts. Her Italian accent kicks in when she’s angry. “We have to see if-”
“We have to get out of here.”
“But what if we can-”
“He’s dead, Risina. I saw the structure come down on top of him.”
“But how… how did it…?”
“I don’t know, but we need to keep moving-”
“It was an accident… we have to-”
“Listen to me! I told you when we started you have to follow my lead, and that’s what I’m telling you now. We have to keep moving-”
“I’m not going to leave until-”
“That was no accident!” I say through clenched teeth.
My words hit her like an uppercut. Her whole face changes as the anger peels away. Her feet start up again and I don’t need to grab her arm to lead the way. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it was supposed to come down on us.”
We spill out of the alley onto Division Street and join a crowd that drifts out of a bar, then change our pace to match the jostling pedestrians, to get lost in them, and she doesn’t say another word though I can see her face pulled tight in my periphery.
I don’t think we’re being followed.
Archibald Grant’s office is deserted, but it won’t be for long. Two forces are at play against us: word travels fast in this business, and power vacuums fill quickly. Some time in the next twenty-four hours, someone is going to find out Smoke died outside that Gold Coast restaurant. Without him around, a few of Archie’s men are going to swoop in here like vultures and clean this place out, take the chairs, take the desks, take anything of value they can get their hands on and sell the lot to the highest bidder. The furniture isn’t where they’ll land the real money, though. Someone who guarded Archie or one of his bagmen will know the value in the files, the contracts, the information. A rival fence will pay handsomely for access to Archie’s work, and some underling will soon attempt to provide it.
“So why are we here now?” Risina asks. “You want the files for yourself?”
“Not the files. File.”
“I don’t understand…”
I’m already ripping through the cabinets, looking for the stack Smoke slid over to me when we were trying to find an anomaly in the contracts over the last couple of years.
I had found an anomaly all right, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
Accidents don’t exist in this business.
“Help me find a file with the name ‘Hepper’ at the top. First name was something like ‘Jan’ or ‘Janet.’”
We start pulling stacks out of the cabinet and blitz through them. I’m only looking at the names on the first page, the names of the targets. If it’s not a match, I toss it to the floor and pick up the next.
None of the names in the initial stack look familiar, must not be ones I fished through the other day. I grab another batch and start flipping pages when Risina pipes up, “Ann Hoeppner?”
“That’s it!” I say, more excitement in my voice than I meant. She hands the dossier over and I open the cover. “Yeah, this is the one.”
Risina blows a stray hair out of her face and places her hands on her hips. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”
I hold up the file. “Accidents don’t exist in this business,” I tell her. And in a few minutes, to prove my point, I’m going to set this office on fire.
In the contract business, hit men employ various methods to kill marks. There are guys who specialize in long-range sniper rifles, guys who work in close with handguns or knives, guys who ply their trade with car bombs or poison or good old-fashioned ropes around the throat. There are experienced vendetta killers who’ll carve up the target or take a piece of the body to bring back to the client, but Archie stayed away from that type of play. Vendetta killers leave an unseemly mess. Mafias like to contract these kinds of hits, but mafias have long memories and hold grudges. Archie knew it’s best not to step into that particular sandbox unless you’re prepared to get dirty.
But Ann Hoeppner’s killer utilized a different method.
Ann was a thirty-eight-year-old college English professor in Columbus, Ohio. She wasn’t married, had no kids, and lived alone just off the Ohio State campus. Normally, college professors don’t make a lot of money, don’t have fancy cars or houses, but Ann had a bank account that would make most Wall Street brokers buckle at the knees. Her grandfather had been a scientist and inventor whose most famous creation was the self-starter for automobile engines. When he retired, he held one-hundred-and-forty-three patents, owned two companies, and was one of the richest men in the Northeast. Ann gave her high school valedictorian speech in a crowded auditorium at the age of eighteen. She told her grandfather’s life story to a bored audience, the exception being the ninety-four-year-old subject of the speech, who watched with moist eyes and rapt attention. He died seven days later.
When an attorney read the contents of the will the following week, everyone in the family was shocked to learn Ann was the sole beneficiary. Even as precocious as she was, the amount of the inheritance humbled and terrified her. Her parents, who had thought the old man senile, were genuinely delighted. Her cousins, aunts, and uncles were not.
Ann spread the money around to her extended family, though open hands were stretched in her direction for the rest of her life. She put most of the windfall into various investments and savings plans and bonds and retirement funds and went about her life as though nothing had happened. Sure, she paid for her tuition, room, board, and books, but never spent extravagantly. She drove a small SUV, lived on campus and ate in the dorm cafeteria. None of her fellow students knew she could have bought and sold the campus ten times over.
She wanted to be an English teacher and nothing, not even the kind of money that determined she’d never have to work a day in her life, deterred Ann from her goal. Nine years of school later, she received not only a doctorate degree but also an offer to teach at her alma mater.
Ann was in her tenth year of teaching when she died. The English building, Denney Hall, is a five-story glass and stone building on Seventeenth Avenue, not far from the football stadium. It has functioning elevators, but Ann liked to walk the stairs to get to her office on the top floor.
There were signs clearly indicating the stairs had recently been mopped, that pedestrians should be cautious, that the surface was slippery. The signs had graphics, too-the familiar yellow triangle accompanied by an exclamation point-“caution” it said. “Cuidado.” But Ann must have had her head in a book (a common occurrence, and a conclusion the police quickly reached). At the landing between the third and fourth floors lay a copy of John Donne’s sonnets. Next to the open book lay Ann Hoeppner, a gash in her forehead and her neck snapped. She wasn’t discovered until an hour after her fall. The death was ruled accidental after a cursory police investigation. Later, her estate was divided amongst her many family members-those same envious aunts, uncles, and cousins-as designated in her will.
But Ann Hoeppner’s death was no more accidental than Smoke’s. Her neck was snapped by a fall, but it didn’t happen the way the police wrote it up, didn’t happen because she had her nose buried in a book, didn’t happen because she failed to pay attention to the caution signs placed at each stairwell entrance. A professional assassin named Spilatro, one of Archie’s contract killers, performed the hit.
Like I said, bagmen use different methods to kill their marks, and Spilatro has a rare specialty: he makes his kills look like accidents. There has to be a direct line between this man’s specialty and the way Smoke just died. Has to be. And I’m willing to bet you can connect the dots from Ann’s file to Archie’s abduction to the note that summoned me out of hiding.
“According to this, Archie used Spilatro three other times. Let’s find those files and hustle out of here.”
We locate two of the three before a large man enters the office through the front door. I have my Glock up and pointed his way before he can step another inch into the room. He keeps his hands in his pockets and meets my stare with blank eyes.
“Who’re you?” he asks, his face unreadable.
“Nobody.”
“Well, Nobody, what’re you doing rifling through the boss’s stuff?”
“The boss is gone.”
He greets this news with the same disaffected expression. His eyes flit to Risina, but I won’t look her way.
“You gonna put that gun down?”
“No.”
He nods now, sniffs a few times. Despite his attempt to play it cool, I take the sniffs for what they are, a nervous tic.
“I think you and your lady friend best vacate.”
“I think you better watch your fucking mouth.”
Those words come from Risina, not me. Now I tilt my head around to look at her, and for the first time I see she has her pistol up too. I expect to see anxiousness on her face, but I see that she’s sporting a half smile instead. It’s unnerving for me; I have no doubt it’s unsettling for the man staring down the barrel.
Slowly, he takes his empty hands out of his pockets and shows them to her…
“I apologize, ma’am…” he’s saying, but she doesn’t let him finish, interrupting-
“My friend and I are going to find the last thing we came to find and then you’ll never see us again. Now you can do one of three things
… you can sit in the corner and watch us until we go, you can leave and never come back, or you can make a play and see what happens. It’s up to you.”
I’ll be damned if I don’t break into a smile. The big man looks at her one more time, back at me, and then makes his decision.
“Don’t shoot me in the back on the way out the door.”
“Get the hell out of here.” Risina waves at the exit with the barrel of her gun. The man takes a last look at us, then nods, turns, and doesn’t look back.
As soon as he’s gone, Risina blows out a deep breath, like a kettle holding the pressure at bay as long as it can before it finally releases steam. When I look over at her, she ignores me and resumes her search for the files. I can see her hands shaking as she sorts through the stack.
“You okay?” I offer.
“What do you think?” she answers flatly.
I know not to push it from there.
It takes another twenty minutes to find the final file. When we leave the aluminum factory, Smoke’s office is ablaze because, like I said, accidents don’t exist in this business.
We sit on opposite ends of a couch, our backs to the armrests, our feet intertwined, facing each other. A pizza box is open on the small, glass coffee table and Risina digs into her third slice. We’re in a two-bedroom suite in one of those corporate hotels that rent by the month to traveling executives. Smoke set us up before we got here, and I’m almost certain the information of where we’re living while we’re in Chicago died with him.
“It’s natural to be nervous,” I offer as Risina polishes off a pepperoni.
“I know it is.” Her response is matter-of-fact, as though she’s already chewed on her flaw for a bit and decided to approach it clinically. “I thought I did a fine job of keeping it under control.”
I agree, but I don’t say so. Instead, I ask, “But for how long?”
“As long as was needed.”
“And if he’d’ve rushed you instead of backing away? What would you have done?”
“He didn’t, so I don’t know.”
“Would you have pulled the trigger?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Because you need to already play it out in your head… decide what to do before it happens. You already have an analyst’s eye and you’re going to have to rely on that to see everything from all angles. Improvisation is a weapon too, but it’s dangerous. Planning is key.”
She starts to interrupt but I hold up a finger. “Planning doesn’t mean you have to know everything before you walk into a room, though it helps. Planning means that as a situation emerges, your brain needs to immediately start calculating, ‘if this, then that. If that, then this.’ Rapid fire, as soon as it’s happening.
“Take the guy today. He walks in unannounced, and you did the right thing, got your gun up and out and pointed in his direction before he could step a foot in the door. Put him on his heels and on the defense. It’s like a chess match, you have to always be thrusting forward, on the offensive. But you can’t just stop there; you can’t think linearly. Immediately, your brain needs to kick in with… ‘if he runs, I follow. If he pulls a gun, I shoot. If he bum-rushes, I shoot. If he wants to talk, I give him some rope.’ All of those decisions at once, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
“Now by the size of him, I figured he was some low-level muscle Archie kept around for protection, but since Smoke wasn’t there to tell us he was on the payroll, I wasn’t going to take any chances. You follow me?”
“I’d follow you anywhere,” she says with a mock-seductive intonation.
“It’s an expression. It means…”
“I know it’s an expression. I just like to see you worked up.”
“Goddam, Risina…”
“Awwww…” she tosses the pizza aside and reverses positions so her body falls on top of mine. “I’m just having some fun.”
Before I can protest, she cuts me off. “Kiss me.”
“What?”
“You’re warm. Kiss me. You can teach me how to act like a killer later.”
And like with the man who walked into Archie’s office, she doesn’t leave me with much of a choice.
The three remaining files fill in some gaps on Spilatro. When he employs a new contract killer, Archie likes to first flesh out the file with information on the assassin himself, and then additional facts and opinions are added to the dossier after the initial hit is complete. Archie’s sister Ruby once told me he put together a file on me, but I never asked for it, and he never gave it to me. Not that it really mattered. If it existed at one time, if it was in his office with all the others, it’s nothing but ashes now.
Spilatro came to Archie as a recommendation from a Brooklyn fence named Jeffrey “K-bomb” Kirschenbaum, a brilliant and feared player in the killing business, a man who wrote the book on how middlemen conduct their lives. Kirschenbaum grew up Jewish in the Bed-Stuy portion of the borough, which toughened him the way fire tempers steel. A gangly white kid in an all-black neighborhood, he had to learn to maneuver like an army strategist from the time he was in grade school, figure out how to manipulate opposing forces so he was never caught in the middle. Let the black kids have their turf wars and street fights. Deduce who was going to stand at the top of the hill, and make sure his allegiance fell in line. He was smart with numbers, but even better, he was smart with information, and a word here or a note there could swing a rivalry in a direction that most benefited “K-bomb.” He liked playing the role of the man behind the curtain, the puller of strings, and as an adult fresh from a short stint at CUNY, he found his way into the killing business, constructing a stable of assassins out of his old contacts from the neighborhood and running his new venture like a CEO. He pioneered the idea of doing the grunt work for his hit men, of not just accepting a fee and doling out assignments, but of following a mark, of putting together a dossier on the target’s life, of setting the table for his hired guns to make their hits. It was a real service operation, from top to bottom, soup to nuts. He provided each gunman with so much information, the shooter could plot myriad ways of killing his target while escaping cleanly. Consequently, a number of skilled assassins sought him out for their assignments, and his reputation grew. He treated his men fairly, and after thirty years, he remains a towering figure in the game.
Archie knew him, and he had exchanged resources with K-bomb from time to time. Five years ago, when a client hired Archie to specifically make a hit look like an accident, Archie reached out to Kirschenbaum to seek advice about whom he should bring in for the job. K-bomb said he had just the man, and farmed Spilatro out to Archie for a percentage. Unfortunately, Archie didn’t collect much more information on Spilatro beyond who his fence was. This sticks out to me, a bit out of character for such a diligent fence. It speaks to how much Archie trusted or looked up to Kirschenbaum. It’s awfully hard to see clearly when we have stars in our eyes.
That first hit was on a news reporter named Timothy O’Donnell, who also happened to be serving on a jury at the time of his death. The New York Times reported that on May 6, construction scaffolding collapsed on top of the middle-aged man while he was jogging his familiar route through downtown. It seems Spilatro isn’t afraid to use old tricks for new assignments.
The other two files present similar kills… a bookkeeper died of asphyxiation in a building fire, and a police detective had his ticket punched when he slipped on a patch of ice and froze to death, unconscious, in an alley behind his local bar in Boston. That particular job was worked as a tandem sweep: Spilatro and the same assassin who struck me as odd before, the woman named Carla who’d worked the personal kill for Archie. What role she played in this murder isn’t mentioned, just that it was a success.
“Here’s what’s absent from all these files…”
“What’s that?” Risina asks.
“Any personal information on Spilatro. What his real name is, where he lives, how he got his start, where he grew up.”
“And Archie usually has that?”
“Yes.”
“But no one knows any of that information about you, either.”
“Except Archie did at one point. And someone else does now.”
She starts to say something, then smiles. “Yes, of course. I know.”
“So we need to find out if Spilatro has a ‘you’ in his life.”
“I see. And how do we do that?”
“We go to New York and talk to his fence. Kirschenbaum.”
“He won’t want to give up that information.”
“No, he won’t.”
“But we’re going to make him.”
“Yes, we are.”
“And he’s good at this. So he’s going to be protected.”
“That’s right.”
I take her face in my hands, one palm on each cheek, and put our foreheads together.
“If you don’t want to do this… if you have any concern at all, I won’t think less of you.”
“Are you kidding? I think there’s a bigger problem evolving that you need to consider.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m starting to like this.”