“Anyway,” Tony said, “he shows up at my apartment door one morning at eight o’clock, Thursday morning, I had Cheka Lee doing nude art with tempera and poster board in the gallery the night before and I was washed. He comes in, he explains who he is, he says he wants to ask me a favor. I tell him I have to hit the john. I get up, lock myself in there and make a phone call. You know I’ve got a phone in the bathroom?”
“You’ve got a phone in the pantry. Who did you call?”
“Uncle Calvin. Under more normal circumstances I would have called Dad, but like I said, this was about eighteen, twenty months ago. Just around the time the indictments came down. Dad was in Washington or somewhere with the lawyers. I should have waited until I could get in touch with him. Uncle Calvin. For God’s sake.”
“I dated one of your uncle Calvin’s stepdaughters once. Delia Ransom. You know her?”
“She’s a fish. Back to the subject. You can imagine what Uncle Calvin was like. All he wanted to do was give me a lecture about whether Dad had or hadn’t committed the violations in the indictment, and I didn’t want to talk about that. Dad and I had already talked about that. So when I finally got Uncle Calvin to the subject of Donald McAdam, he was pissed at me. He came off like one of those guys who’s afraid to write a job recommendation because anything they say they can be sued for. If you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. What McAdam wanted was, like I told you, cocaine with strychnine in it. The fad for that was over, really, but the stuff could be had, except that I didn’t have it. You know how I feel. Do all the drugs you want, just keep the damned stuff out of my life. And especially real nuthouse shit like that strychnine business. There’s a limit even to my tolerance. But there he was, and I wanted to get rid of him, so I gave him a name, an address, and a telephone number.”
“The name, address, and telephone number of a place where he could get what he wanted,” Mickey said helpfully.
Tony laughed. “I sent him to Ashaki Madumbra. You’ve heard about good old Ash. He can get you cocaine. He can get you women. He can get you a Stealth Bomber and someone to fly it.”
“So did McAdam go?”
“He must have,” Tony said, “because of what happened today. At the time, I had no idea. He left my apartment. I went back to my life. Dad decided to plead guilty. I drank too much for three weeks because it was so totally unnecessary and I was so totally pissed off. And that was that.”
“Until today,” Mickey said solemnly.
“Until today,” Tony agreed. “Today, there I am again, asleep on my couch again, except I’m recovering from the performance of a woman who shoots Ping-Pong balls out of her vagina and wouldn’t be considered anything but a burlesque queen except she’s suing the Endowment for not giving her a grant because she says she was denied on political grounds. Which, hell, maybe she was. How should I know? All I know is, there goes the door, and on the other side of it is good old Ash.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You bet, uh-oh. This is eight o’clock in the morning, remember. The deal hasn’t even been done yet. And Ash has heard about it. And he’s upset.”
“Upset that he’s got a customer with a cocaine habit who’s going to have twelve and a half million dollars?”
“Upset that everybody’s going to be so royally pissed off that McAdam got paid that there’s going to be another investigation, maybe a state investigation this time, and state investigations aren’t like federal ones. With Morgenthau’s office, they check everything.”
“Including possible drug use,” Mickey said.
“Right,” Tony answered him.
“Including possible drug connections,” Mickey said.
Tony pushed his empty beer bottle halfway across the table. “What Ash wants,” he said carefully, “is for me to run a buffer. I should take delivery of McAdam’s stuff. I should deliver it to McAdam. I should pass the money back and forth. I sent McAdam to Ash, now I should protect Ash from McAdam.”
“Is this a matter of principle?” Mickey asked him. “Is it that you don’t approve of drug use or what?”
There was a smear of something on the opposite wall, a dark place where the flies clustered and glinted green in the fitful pulsing backshadows of the neon lights. Tony let himself imagine for a moment it was blood—in the Grubb Clubb it was more likely to be vomit—and then checked the wall at the back of his head before he let himself rest against it. There were people who wondered why Tony kept Mickey around, but Tony didn’t wonder at all. Mickey was the only person on earth who knew him well who could understand what he was about to say next.