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“Whatever we require. Tell me where you hang out and I will pay you when there’s a job to be done. Easy money.”
“Are you nuts?”
“We are bootleggers. We pay easy money for muscle. What is your name?”
“Ricky Newdell.”
“What do your pals call you?”
“They call me Hooks. ’Counta my left hook.”
Marat Zolner stared at him.
“My best punch,” Ricky Newdell explained.
“Where do you hang out?”
“Lunchroom at 18th and Tenth.”
“O.K., Hooks. You’ll hear from us. I’m Matt. He’s Jake. Turn around and walk back to West Street.”
“What about these guys?” The man Zolner had blackjacked was out cold. The man Antipov stabbed had not moved since he fell.
Zolner and Antipov wiped the blood off their weapons on the men’s coats.
Ricky Newdell said, “These guys are Gophers.”
Antipov looked at Zolner. “Goofer?” he asked, pronouncing the gang name as Hooks had. “What is Goofer?”
“Neighborhood gangsters. Used to rule the Hell’s Kitchen slum. Leaders dead and in prison.”
Antipov shrugged. “What do we care?”
“The Gophers ain’t gonna take this lying down,” warned Newdell.
“Hooks,” said Zolner. “This is your last chance. If you want easy money, turn around and walk away.”
Hooks Newdell turned around and walked toward West Street. Behind him he heard laughter, and the knife guy with the thick accent saying, “‘Goofers’? Like ‘goofy’?” Hooks did not look back. Something told him with these guys moving into the neighborhood, the Gophers’ days were numbered.
8
MARAT ZOLNER steered Yuri Antipov toward Tenth Avenue.
“Where are we going?”
“I have an auto.”
Antipov’s mouth tightened at the sight of the Packard Twin Six, as Zolner had expected it would. Wait until he saw the place Fern had rented for a hideout.
Zolner drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and east for two hours, over the Brooklyn line into Nassau County, and across Nassau on the Merrick Road to Suffolk and through a dozen villages on the Montauk Highway. The towns were dark, their people sleeping. The farms and forest between the towns were darker, except where roadhouses lit the night, like liners at sea, with colored lights, electric signs, and the headlights of expensive motorcars in parking lots.
Music spilled from the blazing windows.
“A cabaret!” said Antipov, breaking the silence that lay heavily between them.
“They’re called roadhouses in the country, cabarets in the city.”
“In the middle of nowhere.”
