First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [58]
For a moment, he contemplates asking Gus to take the cost of the comics out of his salary. Then he opens one, begins to read it. Almost immediately, he puts it aside, opens another, then another and another. He puts them all aside. Then he takes the box, puts it on the auction counter to be sold.
It's only when he looks up that he sees that Gus has been watching him all along.
ONE MORNING about a week after the auction, there's a present waiting for him when he comes down for breakfast.
He stands staring at the large package resting on the kitchen table. Gus, in a chef's apron, his fingers white with flour, says, "Well, go on, kid, open it."
"It's not my birthday."
Gus expertly pours four circles of batter into a smoking cast-iron skillet. "You don't want me t'have t'give it to someone else, do you?"
Jack feels himself being impelled by Gus's words. His fingers tremble as they rip open the paper. Inside is a square box with a grille on one side. He opens the top: it's a record player. Inside are three albums, one by Muddy Waters, one by Howlin' Wolf, one by Fats Domino.
Gus, flipping corncakes, says, "Life without blues music, now that's a sin. Blues tells all kinds o' stories, the history of the people composed it."
He slides a plate of corncakes onto the table. "Eat yo' breakfast now. Tonight we'll listen to these records together. No sense you sittin' all by yo'self on them hard stairs."
AFTER SIX weeks, Gus decides Jack is ready to observe the backroom deals. The back room is a frigid twelve-by-twelve bunker outfitted with a sofa and two La-Z-Boy easy chairs, between which rests a sideboard on which sits an array of liquor bottles, old-fashioned and highball glasses of sparkling cut crystal. A girl comes in once a day to clean, dust, and vacuum. Gus is extremely particular about the environment in which his deals get hammered out.
Jack fears that these deals somehow involve drug-running because that is one of the businesses Cyril Tolkan is into, and it seems clear to him that Cyril and Gus are rivals. He needn't have worried. The deals are of another nature altogether.
His first day in the back room, Gus tells him, "All my life I was a outcast, someone who wanted t'be happier'n my daddy, but every time I tried, there was a white man standin' in my way. So finally I gave up, went back here t'my own world where I'm the king of the castle."
Through the back door of the Hi-Line come a succession of police detectives. Although they all look different physically, they seem the same to Jack's brain: they're hard, flinty-eyed, dyspeptic. To a man, they've seen enough—often too much—of the streets they are sworn to protect: too much rage, too much bitterness, too much jealousy and envy, too much blood. They inhabit a swamp eyeball-deep in organized prostitution, drug smuggling, murder for hire, turf warfare. They have murder in their sleep-deprived eyes. Jack can see it; he can smell it, taste it like the tang of acrid smoke.
They all want the same thing from Gus: shortcuts to turn their perps into collars. They want to make arrests, no fuss, no muss, arrests that stick, that won't blow back in their faces like street litter. This Gus can do, because what Gus trades in, what makes him his living, is information. Gus's castle may be at times too small to suit his taste, but it's populated by a battalion of corner snitches, gang informants he set in place, embittered turncoats, ambitious politicos—the list seems endless.
Whatever these detectives want, Gus usually has or, if not, can get in a matter of days. All for a price, of course. They pay, with reluctance and a show