The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [74]
Honcho, Pendleton, and Li were gone.
9
Joe Graham hated Providence, a sentiment that united him in at least a small sense with the rest of the world. Providence is a town for insiders, for third-generation harp politicians, Quebecois priests with a gift for gab and a glad hand at charity breakfasts, and mafioso smart guys who run sand and gravel companies and therefore know where the bodies are buried.
It was also a town for a bank that knows where the money is buried, and Ethan Kitteredge was sort of the ace archaeologist of bankers. He could make old money look new, new money look old, and lots of money look gone, and he did it in layers. Ethan Kitteredge was so good at taking care of other people’s money that he had even started a side operation to take care of his investors’ very lives. Friends of the Family looked out for the family friends—that is, the people who put enough money in the Kitteredge family bank to allow the Kitteredge family to live in the quiet splendor to which it had become accustomed. And AgriTech had run a whole lot of money through Ethan Kitteredge’s bank.
This fact made Joe Graham hate Providence even more than usual on this particular day, because Joe Graham had been summoned to a rare meeting at Kitteredge’s office to discuss the AgriTech file. The office looked like a captain’s cabin on a whaling ship. Nautical models plied the grain of expensive wooden bookcases filled with navigation texts and sailors’ memoirs. Kitteredge’s enormous mahogany desk was about as old as the ocean, and had on it a model of the Man’s pride and joy, his schooner Haridan. The place reeked of the sea, which further irritated Joe Graham, who thought the ocean was one gigantic waste of space. He had been to the beach once and hated it: too much sand. So he sat in one of those hard New England chairs, staring pointedly at Ed Levine, while Kitteredge and some preppie cracker discussed the finer points of government policy over a pot of tea. Joe Graham couldn’t give a rat’s ass or a hamster’s dick about government policy. He only wanted to know what had happened to Neal Carey.
So while this Simms yokel was mumbling something about the Chinese tradition of quid pro quo, Graham interrupted him to ask, “So where is Neal Carey?”
Levine shot him a dirty look, but Levine could go fuck himself, maybe eat a couple more steaks and drop fucking dead of a heart attack. Levine was his supervisor, but Graham had known Levine when he was nothing more than hired street muscle. He was one tough Jew—big, fast, smart, and mean—and Graham wasn’t scared of him one bit. Right now he was so angry he’d stick his rubber arm up Levine’s ass and twirl him.
The cracker, Simms, sighed at the interruption but condescended to answer, “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Which word didn’t you understand, Mr. Graham?”
“Listen, you mealy-mouthed fuck—”
“That will be enough, Joe—” Kitteredge said.
Graham saw the Man turn pale with anger. The Man believed in maintaining a tone of immaculate courtesy. Which he can afford to do, Graham thought, because he’s got me to do the nasty shit. Me and Neal.
“No, sir, excuse me, but that’s not enough,” Graham said. He’d thrown the “excuse me” and the “sir” in there in an attempt to save his job and his pension. “Neal Carey gets sent on a job and doesn’t get told what it’s really about. Nobody tells him that Pendleton’s cooped up with a commie spy. Okay, Neal goes off the deep end and boings a major hard-on for this slash—”
“Pardon me?” Kitteredge asked.
“He develops a romantic obsession for the woman,” Levine explained as he drilled Graham with a shut-the-fuck-up glare that didn’t shut him the fuck up.
“So,” Graham continued, “Blue Suit over here knows free labor when he sees it and stands back while Neal gets deeper and deeper into the shit, and now he shows up here and tells us Neal is gone. So, Mr. Simms, the word