Killing Is My Business Page 4

  That Professor Thornton had been a clever guy.

  Ada hadn’t spoken. I stepped out of the alcove and I did up my shirt. It seemed a little tighter across the chest thanks to the curved plate but the buttons stayed where I put them well enough.

  There was a small table in the computer room and a single chair and on the back of my chair was my jacket. On the table was the early edition of today’s newspaper, and on the newspaper was my hat and a paperback book.

  I slipped the jacket off the chair and slipped it onto my back. I picked the hat up and put it on the ear of the chair and then I looked at the newspaper and moved it a little on the table.

  My attention was really on the paperback book. There was a man and a woman on the front and the pair was running from a tentacled monster. The woman didn’t look too happy about it but that might have been more to do with the fact that she was wearing nothing but a chain-mail bikini while her hero wore a tinfoil overall and a fishbowl over his head.

  I opened the book and found several pages with bent-over corners. Someone had been reading. Maybe it had been me.

  “Any good, Ray?”

  I looked up into the corner of the room.

  “Hard to tell,” I said, “on account of the fact that I can’t remember a thing about it.”

  Ada laughed and then she stopped laughing and all I could hear were the tapes rolling and the click of the clock above the door that led out into the main office.

  I went over to that door and I opened it. The office beyond was quiet. There was a big window behind the desk and the sun was coming in through the half-closed slats. I counted the motes of dust dancing in the sunbeams. When I got to eleven thousand two hundred I got bored and I turned back around.

  “Anything on the list for today, Ada?”

  A light flashed. “Working on it, Ray.”

  I nodded. Okay.

  “Any pickups?”

  Pickups were jobs that were ongoing, and they needed picking up as I couldn’t remember what had happened yesterday. It was all recorded on my memory tape, sure, but yesterday’s memory tape was sitting in the storage room that was accessed from a secret door on the other side of the office.

  The advantage to this short-term memory was that I was pretty safe. If I ever got caught, or fell into the wrong hands, nobody would learn anything because I didn’t know anything. What I did know was that I was a robot assassin but I had no idea how many people I’d killed for greenbacks, or even if I had killed anyone at all.

  But Ada knew. She was a computer the size of a room. She remembered everything.

  So a pickup meant her briefing me on the current caseload and the latest developments, and she did that by getting me to plug back in so she could roll through the edited highlights of the relevant memory tapes I brought back in each day. On the face of it this system sounded awkward, and I’m sure it would be were it not for the fact that two computers can talk to each other pretty fast.

  The clock above the door clicked on toward seven a.m. I pursed my lips, or I pretended to, and I decided I liked that expression. It seemed to help me think.

  “Ah … Ada?”

  “A gal can only collate so much data at once, chief.”

  I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, and then I went to the table. I picked up the paperback and opened it to page one. It occurred to me I could have been working on this book for months, or forever.

  I sat in the chair and I began to read. Two minutes later I put the paperback down when Ada spoke. Our plucky hero and his naked companion had already survived an asteroid storm and a solar flare and now their ship was being boarded by pirates from K19 and I hadn’t even had any breakfast yet.

  “Okay, chief,” said Ada. “We have one open case and one new job. No need to buckle yourself in, kid. The pickup is easy as the job is temporarily on hold.”

  “Okay.” I stayed sitting down.

  “The pickup: one Emerson Ellis, real estate magnate. No timeline on this one, which is just as well as you haven’t found him yet. You’ve spent a day on his tail and we know he’s probably not in Los Angeles anymore. He might be in Phoenix. You have his photograph and the address of his business and several properties he owns around the city. You also have a telephone number for Phoenix to call for an update.”

  I nodded. Phoenix could be a problem. Even if I could’ve flown out and back in a day, there was an associated risk with me being out of range of the office. If everything went smoothly, I’d be there and back and happily in my alcove. If there was even one flight delay, I could spend the rest of eternity rusting in the desert air after my memory tape hit the end of the reel, an event I wasn’t sure I wanted to experience and which didn’t sound like it would do me any good at all. And that was if I was even able to get on an airplane in the first place. I might not have had any luggage to check, but I weighed half a ton on my own and that sounded more than a little problematic.

  And all that without knowing whether the target was in Phoenix in the first place.

  I nodded again and I said, “Okay, got it. Lucky that job is open-ended. We’ll just sit and wait.”

  “Right, chief. We just need to keep an ear to the ground for when Mr. Ellis gets back to LA—if he ever left it—and then you can take him out for a quiet drink, whether he wants to or not. But it’s back-burner stuff for now. We’ve got a new job in and boy-howdy is this a doozy.”

  I got comfortable. Ada’s tapes spun and the lights flashed and she told me all about it.

  She was right. It was a doozy.

  When Ada was done I whistled. It came out pretty good, less like a boiling kettle than I had anticipated. When I was done Ada laughed and I swore she finished by taking a drag on her fourth cigarette of the morning.

  The clock above the door clicked over. Seven in the morning. The day was young and the job was hot but I didn’t move from the table. Ada smoked in my mind and I thought I’d like to get a cup of coffee. I wondered if I always felt like a cup of coffee after Ada laid out a brief. I don’t know. I didn’t remember.

  I watched the clock. It clicked over two more minutes and then the tapes on the computer bank to my left came to a halt and then reversed direction.

  Ada was thinking.

  “You don’t like it?” she asked.

  I frowned on the inside.

  “It’s not my favorite.”

  “How would you know that, Raymondo? You don’t remember any other jobs.”

  “That may be true, Ada,” I said, “but right about now I feel more like taking my chances in Phoenix, Arizona.”

  “I get it,” Ada said, “but airfares are a killer. A guy your size we’d need to book two seats there and back and even then might need to give the plane a push-start.”

  I looked up into the corner. I was pretty sure Ada was looking at me over the rim of a cup of steaming black coffee and I thought again how I’d love a cup even though I couldn’t drink the stuff and then the feeling and the image both were gone and I was back in the computer room.

  “Are you sure it’ll work?” I asked.

  “Sure, why not,” said Ada. She sounded as convinced as I felt and not any more.

  “Eight o’clock tonight?”

  “On the dot, chief.”

  “Okay.” I looked at the clock. It was seven-oh-seven in the morning. I had twelve hours and fifty-three minutes until the curtain rose. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to see the show.

  “You got a plan, Ray?”

  I shrugged. I put my hat on and from the back of the door I lifted my trench coat. I slipped it on and did it up and the top button felt tight. So tight it slid out of its hole the first time but it stayed put the second.

  I wanted to ask Ada about my new chest piece but the new job was doing a number on my transistors. I wanted that to be done before anything else. I only hoped I could remember to ask the boss about my repairs later.

  “I’ll go check out the location, make sure I know what’s what. Last thing anyone wants—the
client included—is for this to go wrong, right?”

  “On the money, chief. Reconnaissance. I like it. You’d make a great detective.”

  I hrmmed. It sounded like a chainsaw in need of a good oil.

  “First I have to make a phone call,” I said. Then I opened the door and I headed into the main office.

  I closed the door behind me. Then I stood in the office by the door and I thought about the new job.

  It was a little unusual. It was difficult. It was also potentially dangerous. I hoped Ada had negotiated a good fee.

  I shrugged and adjusted my hat and reached for the telephone on the big desk by the window.

  9

  It was heading toward midmorning by the time I pulled up outside the Bacchanalian, which was by all accounts one of the best Italian restaurants in Hollywood and so named because it only served certain hand-picked wines that were imported from the home country and cost the same as my Buick per bottle, if not per glass.

  I sat in the car and I looked at the front of the place and figured there was some inverse correlation between how good a joint was and the amount of signage on display, which in this case was virtually nonexistent. If you had to ask what the restaurant was called then you couldn’t afford a plate of their spaghetti, let alone a drop of their vini.

  The telephone call to Phoenix had been a bust. I didn’t know who I was calling but the name on the computer printout that was sitting on the blotter on the big desk said P. GARCIA, and when I rang the number a woman answered and said that no, he hadn’t shown. I said thanks and she hung up and didn’t even say good-bye. Maybe that was how they did things in Phoenix, Arizona.

  After the call I went down to the garage and I got the car out and I headed to the address provided by our new client. I didn’t know who they were and that was none of my business. I didn’t know why they wanted the target dead, although in this instance I could guess. That wasn’t any of my business either.

  But it didn’t mean I wasn’t interested.

  The amount of information we got with each job varied. We got a name, usually an occupation. Most times we got a photograph but sometimes we didn’t and instead the client had arranged a finger man to come point the target out. Being a finger man seemed like a risky job on account of the fact that it was their name that was usually next on the job sheet.

  What we never got were reasons. We were paid what we were paid to do the thing and to not ask questions. Business was business and a job was a job and, as Ada might have said, money makes the world go around.

  For this job, we had more than a name and a photo. The client had given us these details and more besides. We not only knew who the target was but we knew all about him and that included knowing where he liked to eat.

  But there was more.

  The client had given us a whole entire plan, a plan which led me to the Bacchanalian, a little Italian restaurant hidden in a quiet street like a secret whispered to a lover. A restaurant where the target would be enjoying his weekly dinner outing in just a little over ten hours.

  The target’s name was Zeus Falzarano, and he was a gangster. It was my job to kill him.

  Except in order to kill him, I had to do something else first.

  I had to save his life.

  * * *

  Zeus Falzarano was a real piece of work. He was Italian, although nobody who ever called him that survived long enough to apologize, on account of the fact that he was born on the island of Sicily, which, at least according to Falzarano, was as Italian as President Kennedy’s maiden aunt.

  Sources said Zeus Falzarano was seventy-nine years old but didn’t look a day over sixty-seven. He was born in a town called Medina and he didn’t leave it until he was somewhere in his mid-fifties. The story went that he was a patriotic man and one fiercely proud of his home town, and saw no reason to leave it until the Italian police, who, unlike Falzarano, considered Sicily to be well within their jurisdiction, moved in to dethrone him. Because Falzarano loved his town and his island so much he spent the first fifty-five years of his life slowly taking the place over.

  He was an astute businessman. The sources said it was a gift, like a savant who can compose an opera without ever hearing a violin or paint the skyline of Paris without having ever seen it and maybe that source was getting a little poetical, but I got the point. Falzarano had built himself up and he built an empire with it, a family-run business that involved large amounts of money that was mostly attached to guns, girls, drugs, gambling, and investment in local infrastructure, construction, and business, and that mostly went unreported to the authorities. With all this money he paid people he could and he made those he couldn’t pay disappear. Over the course of three decades he owned not only his precious town of Medina but most of the island of Sicily and a good chunk of the Italian mainland and bits of Europe as well as a lot of the criminal trade that ran east to west from Russia to France.

  So he was gifted. Born to it. He was a criminal mastermind and he was apparently a real swell guy to work for and people liked him a lot.

  Sure. Put a gun to their head and I figure most people will like a lot of things if you ask them politely.

  The story was that when the Italian polizia got sick of Zeus Falzarano running the courts and the judges and maybe even the president and quite possibly the Pope, he moved out of Medina and emigrated to the one country where he could really work on his spirit of free enterprise.

  The United States of America.

  Why he chose Los Angeles was anyone’s guess, but once he got here he bought a great big house that looked like a castle that was buried in a valley in the Hollywood Hills and he set up this new arm of his little family business.

  He fit right in. He bought up local crime syndicates. He bought up local police. Those who couldn’t be bought he tried to eliminate, but American crime was of a different flavor than the sort he was used to and the gang wars that followed were long and bloody for folk on both sides of the law and Falzarano fared badly. Badly enough to lock himself away in his house and never come out. A lot of people didn’t like him and more than a few of those people wanted to send his body floating back across the Atlantic.

  So, just like any other Hollywood mogul, then.

  What Falzarano did up in his house once the dust had settled was anyone’s guess. He was old and getting older. Nobody had seen him for a couple of years, only his boys, his inner circle imported from Sicily along with their suits and their cars and their aftershave.

  There was a rumor he’d taken up a hobby in his enforced retirement. Motion pictures. Sources said he bought into a movie studio called Playback Pictures and Playback Pictures did pretty well until the head producer, a guy called Chip Rockwell, had an accident of the fatal variety.

  According to Ada, I knew a thing or two about Chip Rockwell. I believed her, but of course I couldn’t remember anything and all my circuits told me I didn’t know the guy from Adam.

  After the death of Chip Rockwell, Playback Pictures wasn’t the same. Maybe Falzarano had gotten bored of it because soon after he turned his hand to another hobby. This one was book writing and the magnum opus that came out of it was called I Didn’t Have Chip Rockwell Killed But If I Did Here’s How I Would Have Done It.

  I asked Ada about that. She said it was a laugh riot. She also said it was a bestseller and that there had been a court case over it that hadn’t done the sales any harm at all. Quite the opposite in fact.

  There was another story that said Zeus Falzarano had bought all the copies of the book himself, but that was just a story.

  Then something interesting happened. Falzarano ventured out of his castle with a couple of Sicily’s finest gangland exports glued to his side. He turned up at a nightclub and so did half the hoods of Los Angeles and even a few from farther afield. That was news enough, at least on the underground grapevine. What else was news was the disappearance of a mobster called Bob Robertson, a goon from New York employed by an East Coast kingpin called
Tieri. Maybe Falzarano had something to do with that and maybe that was the reason that after the night on the tiles he went back up to his house and never came down again. That, or maybe the fact that the body of one of Falzarano’s boys was found dumped in the LA River somewhere out in Compton a couple of days later.

  Whatever the case, something had got Zeus Falzarano scared again. The Los Angeles underworld was braced for another gang war and Falzarano locked himself back up in his castle. Word was that he was a target. Someone had put a price on his head and that someone was probably Tieri.

  Which is where I came in. I didn’t know who the client was and I didn’t care, but someone had put a down payment on Falzarano’s life and it was my job to make sure we got the rest of the money in good time.

  The problem was that Falzarano was locked away in his house in the hills again and sources reported he had enough men and guns to extend the southern border of California well into Mexico if he so desired. Getting to Falzarano posed something of a conundrum.

  Which is why our anonymous client had given us a plan. They would start things off and then I would finish things and everyone would be happy with one less mafioso in Hollywood.

  The secret to getting to Falzarano was getting into his house—and Falzarano himself would provide the key.

  The plan to get the key was, as Ada had said, a real doozy, and was the reason I found myself casing out an Italian restaurant in Hollywood on a Wednesday morning and wondering what I had done with my life to get involved in a scheme like this.

  The plan was simple. The client had laid the whole thing out. That didn’t mean I had to like it, but it went like this:

  Falzarano kept himself locked in his castle except for once-weekly excursions to his favorite restaurant. Call it an extravagance. Call it a flaw. But it was the best restaurant in town and that’s what he did. He took an army with him and he came in through the back and he was as safe in the restaurant as he was in his own dining room.