Mike’s impulse is to stand up but he checks himself. He is the boss after all.
“Daniel, laddie,” he says. “Sit yourself down.”
I walk around the tables a few times, mapping the layout, banking the positions of the chairs in case I have to toss a few.
Mike is antsy. “Sit down, for fuck sake. You ain’t a spaniel.”
In olden days, his boys would have guffawed at this, but now I’m a known quantity and it’s like there’s a gorilla loose in the room.
I sit between Mike and the bar, with the door in my eye line and Zeb on my left in case I have to slap his stupid head for getting this ball of shit rolling downhill.
“Mike,” I say, giving him the sad face. “Sorry to hear about your mother.”
Mike has a picture of his old ma in a lace frame pinned to his lapel. If this is an Irish custom I never heard of it, and I lived there for twenty-odd years.
“Yeah, she was a great old dame.”
“How come you’re not on a plane?”
Mike reddens like I’m making some kind of subtle accusation that he’d rather be here taking care of grudge business than in the auld sod burying his mother. Of course this is exactly what I’m doing. The thing about this situation is that Mike is holding nearly all the cards. The only thing he can’t control is my attitude, so I don’t intend handing over that last card until I have to.
“I am not exactly welcome in Ireland. They got a photo of me in the customs booth. I did a bit of Semtex business with the boys.” He drops me a wink on the boys so I know he’s talking the Republican movement, though the mention of Semtex had pointed me in that direction.
“Yeah, that would be a problem. Why don’t we cut directly to the part where you tell me why I’m here?”
Mike enjoys a bit of drama and so this request pains him. This pain shows in his expression, though with Mike’s bar-fight potato head it’s a bit like watching someone squeeze a fat, old sponge.
“It ain’t that simple, laddie,” he says, touching the picture of Ma Madden on his lapel. “I’m grieving. I got the sweats, the shits and mood swings. I been drunk since yesterday.”
His guys mumble sympathetically. They sound like faraway monks.
Zeb pipes up. “I got stuff for all that. Three pills twice a day. Suppositories though, so you gotta get them right up there.”
Tarantino is the man, but I never really bought those indoor triangular shoot-outs he’s done a couple of times. Who’s gonna get annoyed enough to start blasting with a barrel pointed at their own head? But now I’m starting to think that with Zebulon Kronski somewhere in that triangle, everyone’s past caring about their own lives. Zeb could get the Dalai Lama to shoot dolphins. Here I am trying to jockey for some leverage and he just comes out with some shit about suppositories.
“Do me a favor, Mike,” I say hurriedly. “Get this little prick outta here before someone can’t take it anymore.”
Mike clicks his fingers at Manny. “You are so fucking right. I nearly strangled him three times already. The wife loves him though. Her little miracle worker Zeb.”
Something clicks with me.
Zeb ain’t on the hook anymore.
Just me.
Zeb has done more than make himself invaluable to Mike, he has made himself and his Botox needle indispensible to Mrs. Madden. Maybe he’s not as cavalier with his own life as I thought.
Manny hauls Zeb outta there and he’s trying to make eye contact the whole way, but I blank him. Zeb’s been running a game, and all the time playing it like we’re down the same hole.
“Come on, Daniel. Danny boy. What is it?”
Zeb’s got that guilty whine in his voice. He bloody knows. I want him to know I know, which kind of typifies the juvenile relationship we have, so I let him have a blast of my ire.
“You guys don’t like Jesus, right? How about Judas? You got him in your book?”
I gotta hand it to Zeb, he’s not a bad actor. He pulls off shock and hurt pretty well. First his entire head jerks with the force of my words, then the pain creeps into his eyes. Not too shabby.
“What are you saying, Dan? Talk to me.”
This is where Zeb’s gig falls down. Anyone who is familiar with Dr. Kronski knows all too well that his response to any false accusation is a bilingual litany of variations on the phrase fuck you.
I look him square in the eye. “You’re drifting out of character, Zeb. You’ve lost your motivation.”
His jaws are still flapping when Manny pushes him through the swing door and I cannot believe that I have risked my life several times for this ingrate. I don’t want thanks but I would appreciate a little solidarity.
When Zeb leaves a lot of the crazy leaves with him and it’s just believable that Mike and I can do a little mano a mano and then Mike says:
“Daniel. I know we’re in a bit of a bind, but I think we should look for the opera-toonity here.”
Opera-toonity. I grind my teeth. I gotta make the best deal I can here and blowing my top over a mispronunciation seems a little childish.
So I do not slap Mike in his greasy chops. What I do is say, “Mike. You’re grieving, man. You just lost your mom and that’s major trauma for anyone, but for us Irish, it’s earth-shattering.”
Pretty good, eh?
I rehearsed that on the way over here.
“That’s it exactly, Dan. Earth-shattering. You hit the nail on the head.” Mike fingers the lace on his lapel. “But we have a duty to the dead, and that duty is to keep on living. We respect those who have passed on by grabbing life by the throat, as it were.”
Looks like I wasn’t the only one rehearsing. I nod for a while, seemingly absorbing the wisdom of Mike’s words, but actually trying to gauge if I could sink my fingers into his fat neck before his boys shoot me. It’s doubtful. We got a table and ten feet of space between us.
“It’s like this, Daniel,” says Mike. “I got a proposition to make. This is a real opera-toonity for you to get out from under.”
He said it again and I feel my face spasm like I got slapped.
“Out from under? How far out?”
“Out from under in that I don’t have to kill you no more.”
“Me and Zeb, you mean?”
Mike grimace/grins like it’s out of his control. “Well, not so much Zeb. He’s like Mrs. Madden’s little pet doctor. She’s got way more friends now. Everyone’s a winner. But you, you’re expendable.”
Fabulous. I’m expendable. When have I ever been anything else? They’re gonna scrawl that on the body bag I get buried in. What’s-his-name was expendable.
“Is that it? You don’t have to kill me no more? What about protection on the club? Is that on the table?”
Mike laughs. “No. That ain’t anywhere near the table. That ain’t even in the same zip code as the fuckin’ table.”
This is good news, because if Mike wasn’t expecting me to come back alive from whatever his proposition is, he would throw the monthly payment into the pot. Why not? Then again, I could be getting played.
Mile clears his throat for the big speech. “You gotta ask yourself, Dan, why Mr. Madden would give me an opera-toonity to get square.”
This is confusing: Mike is talking about himself in the third person but me in the first person.
“Should I take that opera-toonity?” continues Mike. “Or should I throw that opera-toonity back in his face?”
You gotta be kidding me. I feel a vein pulse in my forehead.