Free Only Child by Andrew Vachss

of. If you don't give them a chance to earn, they get . . . unreliable. So what you do, you find yourself a good solid manufacturer of TV sets. And you sell a few of them. Carefully, and only to the right people. This is good for you, good for your crew. Hell, it'd be good for everyone if your boss would just green-light it. But he's not going to do that, and you know it."

Giovanni looked bored. Except for his eyes.

"Meanwhile," I went on, "you've got a regular payroll to meet, a big nut to crack. Much bigger than the boss knows. You've got to keep those wheels oiled. Another problem you've got, you've been one of the top salesmen, on the books. And the way you manage that, you sweeten all the deals on vacuum cleaners. Say the boss expects a hundred a month. But you, you're handing him ten more. Keep him happy. But what that means is you've got to move a few more of those TV sets to make up the deficit.

"Now, maybe, probably, in fact, the boss knows you're into TV sets. He's got his rules, but so long as you're earning that strong, and he gets his taste, he might not be so heavy into enforcement. Some bosses, they're like bitches; you know what I'm saying? 'Bring me that money, honey. Buy me presents. Get me stuff. Take me places. But don't tell me where you get it all, that's not my problem.' Then, when you get popped for something, they go, ' Ohmygod, I had no idea !' That sound about right?"

"Like you were listening in," the Italian said.

"A big boss is always a politician," the Latino said, trying to smooth over his partner's habit of playing picador. "This is the same in my business, too. A politician wants things done, but he doesn't want to touch the work with his own hands."

I nodded the way you do when you hear great wisdom, marking what the Latin was really telling me— he wasn't the boss in his organization, either.

"How can I help you?" I asked them.

The two men exchanged looks at the outer edge of my vision. I leaned forward, opened the pack of cigarettes they'd brought me, fired one up with the gold lighter. I took a deep drag, then put the cigarette in the ashtray, stared at the smoke, waiting.
    • • •
    "T his gets complicated," the Italian said.

I watched the smoke. The trick is to look into it, never through it.

"You got any idea how dirty the feds play, sometimes?" the Italian asked.

"There's all kinds of feds," I told him. "Vietnam was the feds. Waco and Ruby Ridge, that was the feds. So was COINTELPRO."

"What's that last one?"

"Political," the Latin answered for me.

"This isn't that," the Italian said.

"Political?"

"What it is, it's personal."

"I don't know any feds," I said, to head him off in case he was talking about solving his problems with a bribe. I've got no moral problem with being a bagman, but I'd never trust strangers at either end.

The Italian did the thing with his breath again. The Latin lit a cigarette of his own, apparently used to it.

"You know the best way to flip a man?" he asked me.

"Depends on the man," I said. "And where his handle is."

"Right. But it's not true that everybody's got one. Gotti took the ride alone. And he never said word fucking one."

"Uh-huh," I agreed. "Everybody talks Old School, but only a few walk it when the weather turns bad."

"Remember the first of the super-rats?" he asked me, like a kid testing a newcomer's knowledge with a soft lob down the middle of the plate.

"Valachi?"

"Joe Valachi. He blew the covers off our thing major, back in the day. You know what turned him?"

"Same thing Henry Hill said turned him . Barbosa, Pesnick, plenty of others, too."

" 'Said' is right. But Valachi, see, they thought he was going to roll over. So they put out a contract on him. And they missed. They didn't clip him, so now what's he going to do?"

"What he did."

"Yeah. You ever wonder how they got the idea that Valachi had gone rotten?"

"Who knows? Maybe some old man got paranoid. Or maybe they figured, He's