First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [45]
The passageway gives out onto a cavelike room with a low ceiling the color of burnt bread. It is dominated by a line of enormous stainless steel ovens. A cool wind blows from a pair of huge air-conditioning grilles high up in the wall. Two men in long white aprons go about their laconic task of filling the kneading machines, placing pale, thin loaves into the ovens in neat rows.
Standing in the center of the room is a squat man with the neck of a bull, the head of a bullet. His wide, planular olive-gray face possesses a sleekness that can come only from daily shaves at a barbershop.
"Hello, Cyril," Gus says. He does not extend his hand. Neither does Cyril.
Cyril nods. He takes one glance at Jack, then his round, black eyes center on Gus. "He looks like shit, that kid." He's got a curious accent, as if English isn't his first language.
Gus knows a put-down when he hears one. He chews an imaginary chaw of tobacco ruminatively. "He looks like shit 'cause a Andre."
Cyril, divining the reason for the visit, seems to stiffen minutely. "What's that to me?"
Gus puts one huge hand on Jack's shoulder with an astonishing gentleness. "Jack belongs to me."
The bakers are looking furtively at the two men as if they are titans about to launch lightning bolts at each other.
"I would venture to say Andre didn't know that."
"Andre an' his crew beat the crap outta Jack." Gus's voice is implacable. The inner rage informs his face like heat lightning.
Cyril waits an indecent moment before acquiescing. "I'll take care of it."
"I warned you 'bout that muthafucka," Gus says immediately.
Cyril shows his palms. "I don't want any trouble between us, Gus."
"Huh," Gus grunts. "You already been through that bloodbath."
THE LINCOLN Continental is singed with invisible fire as Gus drives them away from the bakery. Gus, brooding, is like a porcupine with his quills bristling.
"That muthafucka," he mouths, his eyes straight ahead. And Jack doesn't know whether he means Andre or Cyril.
"You know that bakery isn't a bakery," Jack says. "First off, there were no customers, just some men standing around." He's afraid of what he's said, afraid that Gus's seething will find its outlet in him. But he can't help himself; it's part of what's wrong with him. His brain is exploding with everything he saw, heard, intuited, extrapolated upon.
"Course it ain't only a bakery. Fuckin' Cyril runs drugs 'n' numbers outta there."
Times like now, when he can focus on what his own brain has recorded, when it shows him the big picture, when he can "read" the signs and from them build a three-dimensional model in his mind, he has a clarity of thought he finds exhilarating. "I mean they're making something more than bread there."
Brakes shriek as all at once his words sink in. Gus pulls the Continental over to the curb. The engine chortles beneath them like a beast coming out of a coma. Gus throws the car into park. His seat groans a protest as he twists around to stare at Jack.
"Kid, what the hell you talkin'?"
For once Jack isn't intimidated. He's in his own world now, secure in what he has seen, what he knows, what he will say.
"There was the smell."
"Yeast and butter and sugar, yah."
"Underneath all those things there was another smell: sharp and blue."
"Blue?" Gus goggles at him. "How the fuck can a smell be blue?"
"It just is," Jack said. "It's blue, like the smell when my mother takes off her nail polish."
"Acetone? Nail polish remover is all acetone. I use it to take glue spots offa stuff people bring in to my pawnshop." Gus's expression is thoughtful now. "What else, kid?"
"Well, that cookie the guy gave me was days old. It should've been fresh. Plus which, whatever he had on his hands wasn't flour or yeast, because his fingertips were stained orange by what he had on them."
Gus appears to think about this revelation for some time. At last he says, as if in a