My eyes kept coming back to the food in his beard. It hung there, this big, greasy glob of something, and I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth it could be. The old man across from me kept talking, and with every word, the glob jiggled like an expert belly-dancer amongst the gray of beard.
Cheese? Some kind of soup maybe. Chowder? The plate in front of him was bare; no clues there.
“So you’ll do this favor for me?” I heard him say with the half of my brain that was listening. The other half worked overtime to figure out the mystery of the glimmering globule of leftovers. I nodded.
The man across the table from me was my father. I did business with him from time and time, and if it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have ever thought about my line of work, let alone gotten into it. I owe him since, after all, my work has made me a very rich man.
My father is a criminal. Big-time. He’s what Spider-Man would have referred to as a “kingpin.” Or so I would imagine. I don’t know exactly how far the old man has his hand in the criminal jar of New York’s underworld, but it’s far enough to be sticky.
Allow me to explain. I know enough to realize that he’s an important figure in the slimy underbelly of the city’s darker elements, but that’s about all I know. He tried to explain to me once what all he was into and how important he was, what rung he fit on the ladder of bigwig bad-guys and so on and so forth, but I kept zoning out and forgot everything he told me about five minutes after he finished.
I, on the other hand, am what you’d call a contract killer. I’m told who to kill, and I go out and kill this person. Then I am paid. I never see my employers face-to-face. My dear old dad takes care of all of that. He just slides me the folder with the name and photo and likewise important information to me, and I go out and eliminate the face on the photo and name on the paper. Pretty simple.
But my eyes kept coming back to that food in his beard.
If I could just figure out what it was. I figured that a few minutes to peruse my menu might be of some help.
“Do you mind?” I asked, motioning towards the menu. The old man stammered for a moment as I had interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, blinked twice as he regained his stature, and then nodded, the globule of food nodding along with him.
“Of course, of course, you must be starved,” Pop said. I thanked him, opened the menu, and scanned its contents. With a mental groan, I realized quickly enough that most of the items were in French. Being a strictly cheeseburger and fries kinda guy, the menu might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’d need a Rosetta stone to sort through any of it.
“Not hungry,” I said and put the menu down.
Dad slid a manilla folder in my direction with wrinkly, dry hands, and the gaudy rings on his fingers shone bright in the atmospheric lighting of the restaurant. I wondered if someone had planned the lighting in the place for this specific purpose: to show off old men’s bling-bling.
“See what this will do for your appetite,” he said. He assumed that I had enjoyed killing, hungered for it, because I did it so well. Why not? I supposed that it was a logical assumption. But he was dead wrong.
I think that it’s easy to make lots of assumptions about something that you know little about or have never done, the assumptions being completely logical and also one-hundred percent incorrect.
I don’t understand why he felt it was necessary to make this assumption. Did he feel the need to understand me? Was this is a way of showing that he had some connection? That he “got” it? Why? I don’t pretend to have any inkling of what goes on in that cavernous brain of my father’s, so why would he feel the need to act as though he knew what was going on in my own?
Now in the movies, hired killers usually open up their manilla envelopes and sort through everything, documents, pictures, instructions, right then and there in the middle of a public restaurant. How stupid is that! Obviously, you can’t believe everything you see in the movies. I tucked the envelope into my jacket for later viewing.
I often wondered how many undercover agents were in the restaurant, watching us, dying to know just what the contents of these manilla envelopes my Dad passed to me contained. They probably thought it was just my weekly allowance and that I was the spoiled rich kid son of a corrupt mobster.
“Time frame?” I asked the old man. I wanted to follow up the question with, “And what the hell is that in your beard?” However, a man like my father has to be treated with a certain amount of respect.
Better to let him find and take care of the renegade glob of food on his own than embarrass him and face the wrath of his temperamental nature. My pop was a man who did not like his faults pointed out to him, and if and when he did happen to discover a problem, he liked to take care of it himself.
“Tonight,” the old man said and dipped his chin into his chest, looking at me with serious eyes. The glare he gave me let me know that this was a job that could not be fucked up. “Get it right, right now,” the look said.
“Then I better get going,” I replied, nodded at him, and took my leave of his esteemed presence. I wondered how long it was going to take him to notice the crap in his beard.
***
After some inventive driving to get rid of any possible police tails I might have on me, I parked in a darkened alley and opened the envelope my father had given me. The alley looked dangerous, but hell, I was dangerous too. I ripped open the top and dumped the contents into my lap.
Pictures of two people. A man and a woman. The man was a geeky looking bastard, wearing glasses and a three-piece suit that screamed Wall Street. This guy was my target.