A Dance at the Slaughter House

I thought of Durkin and the hundred dollars I'd given him. "I shouldn't take this from you," he'd said. But he hadn't given it back.

"I never touched cocaine again," Mick said. "And do you know why? Because it was too fucking good. I don't ever want to feel that good again." He brandished the bottle. "This lets me feel as good as I need to feel. Anything more than that is unnatural. It's worse than that, it's fucking dangerous. I hate the stuff. I hate the rich bastards with their jade snuff bottles and gold spoons and silver straws. I hate the ones who smoke it on the streetcorners. My God, what it's doing to the city. There was a cop on television tonight saying you should lock your doors when you're riding in a taxi. Because when your cab stops for a light they'll come in after you and rob you. Can you imagine?"

"It keeps getting worse out there."

"It does," he said. He took a drink and I watched him savor the whiskey in his mouth before he swallowed it. I knew what the JJ&S twelve-year-old tasted like. I used to drink it with Billie Keegan years ago when he tended bar for Jimmy. I could taste it now, but somehow the sense-memory didn't make me crave a drink, nor did it make me fear the dormant thirst within me.

A drink was the last thing I wanted on nights like this. I had tried to explain it to Jim Faber, who was understandably uncertain of the wisdom of my spending long nights in a saloon watching another man drink. The best I could do was to suggest that somehow Ballou was drinking for both of us, that the whiskey that went down his throat quenched my thirst as well as his own, and left me sober in the process.

HE said, "I went to Queens again Sunday night."

"Not to Maspeth."

"No, not to Maspeth. Another part entirely. Jamaica Estates. Do you know it?"

"I have a vague idea of where it is."

"You go out Grand Central Parkway and get off at Utopia. The house we were looking for was on a little street off Croydon Road. I couldn't tell you what the neighborhood looked like. It was full dark when we went out there. Three of us, and Andy driving. He's a grand driver, did I tell you?"

"You told me."

"They were expecting us, but they didn't expect we'd have guns in our hands. Spanish they were, from somewhere in South America. A man and his wife and the wife's mother. They were dope dealers, they sold cocaine by the kilo.

"We asked him where his money was. No money, he said. They had cocaine to sell, they didn't have any cash. Now I knew they had money in the house. They'd had a big sale the day before and they still had some of the money around."

"How did you know?"

"From the lad who gave me the address and told me how to get through the door. Well, I took the man in a bedroom and tried to talk sense to him. Talked with my hands, you might say. He stuck fast to his story, the little greaseball.

"And then one of the lads comes in with a baby. 'Get up off the money,' he tells the man, 'or I'll cut the wee bastard's throat.' And the babe's screaming through all this. No one's hurting him, you understand, but he's hungry or he wants his mother. You know how it is with babies."

"What happened?"

"If you can believe this," he said, "the father as much as says we can go to hell. 'I don't think you do thees,' he says, looking me right in the eye.

" 'You're right,' I told him. 'I don't kill babies.' And I told my man to take the babe to its mother and have her change his diaper or give him a bottle, whatever would stop his crying." He straightened up in his chair. "And then I took the father," he said, "and I put him in a chair, and I left the room and came back wearing my father's apron. One of the lads- Tom it was, you know Tom, behind the bar most afternoons."

"Yes."

"Tom had a gun to his head, and I had the big cleaver that was my father's also. I went over and tried it out on the bedside table, just took a good whack at it and it collapsed into a pile of kindling. Then I took hold of his arm just above the wrist, pinning it to the arm of the chair, and with my other hand I raised up the cleaver.

" 'Now, you spic bastard,' I said, 'where's your money, or don't you theenk I'll take your fucking hand off?' " He smiled with satisfaction at the memory. "The money was in the laundry room, in the vent pipe for the dryer. You could have turned the house upside down and never found it. We were out of there in no time, and Andy had us safely home. I'd have been lost out there, but he knew all the turns."

I got up and went behind the bar to pour myself another cup of coffee. When I got back to the table Mick was gazing off to one side. I sat down and waited for the coffee to cool and we both let the silence stretch for a while.

Then he said, "We left them alive, the whole household. I don't know, that could have been a bad idea."

"They wouldn't call the police."

"They couldn't do that, and they weren't well connected, so I didn't think they'd come back at us. And we left the cocaine. There was ten kilos of it that we found, shaped like little footballs. 'I'm leaving you your coca,' I told him, 'and I'm leaving you alive. But if you ever come back at me,' I said, 'then I'll come back here. And I'll wear this'- pointing to the apron- 'and I'll carry this'- the cleaver- 'and I'll lop off your hands and feet and whatever else I can think of.' I'd do no such thing, of course. I'd just kill him and be done with it. But you can't scare a drug dealer by telling him you'll kill him. They all know somebody will kill them sooner or later. Tell them you'll leave them with some pieces missing, though, and the picture sticks in their mind."

He filled his glass and took a drink. "I didn't want to kill him," he said, "because I'd have had to kill the wife too, and the old woman. I'd leave the baby because a baby can't pick you out of a lineup, but what kind of a life would I be leaving it? It's got a bad enough life already, with that for a father.

"Because look how he called my bluff. 'I don't think you do thees.' The bastard didn't care if I did it. Go ahead, kill the baby, he can always start another one. But when it was a question of his hand winding up on the floor, why, he wasn't so fucking tough then, was he?"

A little later he said, "Sometimes you have to kill them. One runs for the door and you drop him, and then you have to take out all the rest of them. Or you know they're not people who will let it go, and it's kill them or watch your back for the rest of your life. What you do then is scatter the drugs all over the place. Grind the bricks to powder, pour it on the bodies, tread it into the rug. Let it look like dealers killing each other. The cops don't break their necks to solve that kind of killing."

"Don't you ever take the drugs along?"

"I don't," he said, "and I'm giving up a fortune, and I just don't care. There's so much money in it. You wouldn't have to deal in it, you could sell the lot to someone. It wouldn't be hard to find someone who wanted to buy it."

"No, I don't suppose it would."

"But I'll have no part of it, and I won't work with anyone who'll use it or traffic in it. The cocaine I left behind the other night, I could have got more for it than I took in cash from the dryer vent. There was only eighty thousand there." He lifted his glass, set it down again. "There should have been more. I know he had another stash somewhere in the fucking house, but I'd have had to chop off his hand to get it. And that would have meant killing him after, and killing the lot of them. And calling the police later, telling them there was a baby crying in a house on such-and-such a street."

"Better to take the eighty thousand."

"That's what I thought," he said. "But there's four thousand right off the top for the lad who told us where to go and how to get in. A finder's fee, you call it. Five percent, and I shouldn't wonder he thought we got more and were cheating him. Four thousand for him, and a good night's pay for Tom and Andy and the fourth fellow, whom you don't know. And what's left for myself is a little less than what I paid to get Andy off the hook for the hijacking." He shook his head. "I always need money," he said. "I don't understand it."

I talked some about Richard Thurman and his dead wife, and about the man we'd seen at the fights in Maspeth. I took out the sketch and he looked at it. "It's very like him," he said. "And the man who drew it never saw the man he was drawing? You wouldn't think it could be done."

I put the sketch away and he said, "Do you believe in hell?"

"I don't think so."

"Ah, you're fortunate. I believe in it. I believe there's a place reserved for me there, a chair by the fire."

"Do you really believe that, Mick?"

"I don't know about the fire, or little devils with fucking pitchforks. I believe there's something for you after you die, and if you lead a bad life you've got a bad lot ahead of you. And I don't lead the life of a saint."

"No."

"I kill people. I only do it out of need, but I lead a life that makes killing a requirement." He looked hard at me. "And I don't mind the killing," he said. "There are times I have a taste for it. Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"But to kill a wife for the insurance money, or to kill a child for pleasure." He frowned. "Or taking a woman against her will. There's more men than you'd think who'll do that last. You'd think it was just the twisted ones but sometimes I think it's half the human race. Half the male sex, anyway."

"I know," I said. "When I was at the Academy they taught us that rape was a crime of anger toward women, that it wasn't sexual at all. But over the years I stopped believing that. Half the time nowadays it seems to be a crime of opportunity, a way to have sex without taking her to dinner first. You're committing a robbery or a burglary, there's a woman there, she looks good to you, so why not?"

He nodded. "Another time," he said. "Like last night, but over the river in Jersey. Dope dealers in a fine house out in the country, and we were going to have to kill everybody in the house. We knew that before we went in." He drank whiskey and sighed. "I'll go to hell for sure. Oh, they were killers themselves, but that's no excuse, is it?"

"Maybe it is," I said. "I don't know."

"It's not." He put the glass down and wrapped his hand around the bottle but didn't lift it from the table. "I'd just shot the man," he said, "and one of the lads was searching for more cash, and I heard cries coming from another room. So I went in there, and there's one of the boys on top of the woman, with her skirt up and her clothes ripped, and she's fighting him and crying out."

" 'Get off her,' I told him, and he looked at me like I was mad. She was choice, he said, and we were going to kill her anyway, so why shouldn't he have her before she was no use to anybody?"

"What did you do?"

"I kicked him," he said. "I kicked him hard enough to break three ribs, and then before I did anything else I shot her between the eyes, because she shouldn't have to put up with more of it. And then I picked him up and threw him against the wall, and when he came stumbling off it I hit him in the face. I wanted to kill him, but there were people who knew he'd worked for me and it would be like leaving a calling card behind. I took him away from there and paid him his share and got a closemouthed doctor to bandage his ribs, and then I packed him off. He was from Philadelphia, and I told him to go back there, that he was finished in New York. I'm sure he doesn't know to this day what he did that was wrong. She was going to die anyway, so why not have the use of her first? And why not roast her liver and eat it, why let the flesh go to waste?"