pretty damned hard.”
“So I’m supposed to wrap it in a baby blanket and leave it outside their door?”
“Look, Boss, we should’ve sold that shit the day we found it. Or even better, just handed it back to DiNoto. He would’ve treated us right. Now it’s just a matter of time before he’s on to us, if he isn’t already. All I’m saying is, you need to figure out how to get the stuff back to them or you’ll have a real problem.”
Mundi swiveled his chair around and stared through the window into brown gloom. He didn’t want to figure anything out. He needed a rest. But he wasn’t going to get one anytime soon.
For the past ten days Manhattan had been trapped under a bubble of cold air, breathing and rebreathing its own gasses. Such things occasionally happened in the summer. The papers called it a temperature inversion. Mundi guessed the air was toxic by this time. It certainly looked like it could kill you.
His chest felt constricted. It was all polluted. Everything. From some primal leak. The cosmic sump pump on the long-forgotten universal construction site, coughing out vile ooze, ka-thunk, splat, as the great wheel went around, probing the same cesspool over and over. A dead wife, a daughter who was breaking his heart, and a business that was going under. Now Roth was pressing him for an answer to the latest problem. What the fuck did Roth know about problems?
The whole operation was in the tank, had been for years.They’d long since run out of gullible Long Island farmers, and the Newark riots had devastated their underinsured or uninsured properties there.To make matters worse, the Germans—who initially seemed very interested in a major deal for Newark—had backed out, frightened by the uprising of die Schwartzen . Didn’t even ask to look at the books, which had been Mundi’s greatest dread prior to the riots.
Now Roth wanted him to go crawling to DiNoto, begging for a break. Fuck that. All Roth cared about was keeping Mundi Enterprises alive so that he’d have a job. He’d been a good soldier, Mundi would never say otherwise. Back in the old days he’d even been a creative force. But lately he was just on the tit like everybody else. Well, that act was getting old. It was time to lose him. It was time to fold the whole fucking outfit.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to shut Mundi Enterprises down. Gloria didn’t want any part of the company, so what point was there trying to save it? For that matter, in trying to win her back, trying to convince her of anything? She’d already made her choices.
It was damned sad, he saw now, because the choice had been his. He’d always been too busy, too distracted to put in any real time with her. There’d always been reasons. When Gloria was an infant he told himself he’d be able to relate to her better when she could talk. When she learned to talk he realized the things he had to say were too serious for a little girl, so he decided to wait. Then her mother’s health problems came to dominate everything and there never seemed to be the right moment. Now his daughter was fullgrown, and the two of them had no language, no experience, nothing in common. Hell, Roth had been more of a father to her than he.
This line of thought was almost immediately displaced by a whole scrapbook of images of Gloria’s sullen face, ages one to twenty-six, by memory flashes of her tantrums, of her sidelong glimpses of intense loathing—when all he’d done was love her, his only child, as completely as he could. He’d provided her with the best life he could—including a high-class education—and the fact that she’d chosen to throw it back in his face was her decision, not his. It was probably the fucking education that put the nail in the coffin. Big mistake.
Thinking about Gloria in this way caused him to remember the detective, Kelly. Suddenly, Mundi’s depression and self-pity were enhanced by a pang of mortal embarrassment. What was he
“So I’m supposed to wrap it in a baby blanket and leave it outside their door?”
“Look, Boss, we should’ve sold that shit the day we found it. Or even better, just handed it back to DiNoto. He would’ve treated us right. Now it’s just a matter of time before he’s on to us, if he isn’t already. All I’m saying is, you need to figure out how to get the stuff back to them or you’ll have a real problem.”
Mundi swiveled his chair around and stared through the window into brown gloom. He didn’t want to figure anything out. He needed a rest. But he wasn’t going to get one anytime soon.
For the past ten days Manhattan had been trapped under a bubble of cold air, breathing and rebreathing its own gasses. Such things occasionally happened in the summer. The papers called it a temperature inversion. Mundi guessed the air was toxic by this time. It certainly looked like it could kill you.
His chest felt constricted. It was all polluted. Everything. From some primal leak. The cosmic sump pump on the long-forgotten universal construction site, coughing out vile ooze, ka-thunk, splat, as the great wheel went around, probing the same cesspool over and over. A dead wife, a daughter who was breaking his heart, and a business that was going under. Now Roth was pressing him for an answer to the latest problem. What the fuck did Roth know about problems?
The whole operation was in the tank, had been for years.They’d long since run out of gullible Long Island farmers, and the Newark riots had devastated their underinsured or uninsured properties there.To make matters worse, the Germans—who initially seemed very interested in a major deal for Newark—had backed out, frightened by the uprising of die Schwartzen . Didn’t even ask to look at the books, which had been Mundi’s greatest dread prior to the riots.
Now Roth wanted him to go crawling to DiNoto, begging for a break. Fuck that. All Roth cared about was keeping Mundi Enterprises alive so that he’d have a job. He’d been a good soldier, Mundi would never say otherwise. Back in the old days he’d even been a creative force. But lately he was just on the tit like everybody else. Well, that act was getting old. It was time to lose him. It was time to fold the whole fucking outfit.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to shut Mundi Enterprises down. Gloria didn’t want any part of the company, so what point was there trying to save it? For that matter, in trying to win her back, trying to convince her of anything? She’d already made her choices.
It was damned sad, he saw now, because the choice had been his. He’d always been too busy, too distracted to put in any real time with her. There’d always been reasons. When Gloria was an infant he told himself he’d be able to relate to her better when she could talk. When she learned to talk he realized the things he had to say were too serious for a little girl, so he decided to wait. Then her mother’s health problems came to dominate everything and there never seemed to be the right moment. Now his daughter was fullgrown, and the two of them had no language, no experience, nothing in common. Hell, Roth had been more of a father to her than he.
This line of thought was almost immediately displaced by a whole scrapbook of images of Gloria’s sullen face, ages one to twenty-six, by memory flashes of her tantrums, of her sidelong glimpses of intense loathing—when all he’d done was love her, his only child, as completely as he could. He’d provided her with the best life he could—including a high-class education—and the fact that she’d chosen to throw it back in his face was her decision, not his. It was probably the fucking education that put the nail in the coffin. Big mistake.
Thinking about Gloria in this way caused him to remember the detective, Kelly. Suddenly, Mundi’s depression and self-pity were enhanced by a pang of mortal embarrassment. What was he
Similar Books
