THE SUITING: 25th Anny Edition, page 1
THE SUITING: 25th Anny Edition
By
Reb MacRath
Writing as Kelley Wilde
Copyright © 1988, 2013 by Reb MacRath
All Rights Reserved.
Note to the Reader
The French spoken in Quebec today is sometimes labeled ‘Joual’. The official term is ‘Quebecois’—a unique hybrid of Larousse-proper French and that peculiar to Quebec. For translations of expressions not made clear by context, readers are referred to the Appendix. Fair warning: this section is mostly blue.
This special retailored edition, or remix, has been edited extensively. In the old days I had a thing for ellipses—you know…leader dots…like these. I’ve kept a few for sentimental reasons, but I’m pleased to say that most are gone. At every turn, this time around, I thought of the reader: what would be clearer, quicker and more entertaining to read. This may still fall short of what I’d hoped to call The Perfector’s Cut. But I’m still proud to offer a more streamlined and elegant fit.
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
It is said a man could do worse than die wearing a Blake Tobey suit. Ordinarily Bouchette, a superstitious man, would have found this thought alarming. Today it made him feel still more alive. Certainly the suit was worth the risk twice taken coming to Blake Tobey Disegnatore. In the one town he should have avoided.
“Hein, monsieur? Comment ça va?” Horace, the salesman, stood back. He winked, dabbing the curled tip of his great mustache. “Is this or is not a three thousand dollar suit?”
Bouchette murmured, “Oui,” but fixed on his reflection. He had hoped, of course…and dreamed…but this! He felt, somehow, sprung—like a lion fresh out of its cage. Not at all like a gorilla in expensive clothes.
A body like Bouchette’s was not easy to dress well. Even Horace had let out a whistle when first circling his chest with the tape. Bouchette was used to that. At 5’10”, 195 lbs., with a 31” waist, he was all shoulders, pecs, lats and biceps. When he breathed, heads turned.
Elegance was one thing no one had yet accused him of, with his black Zapata mustache, his broken nose, the eight-ball tattooed on his forearm (a grim, but effective, reminder of a year that required great care). But the man in the mirror today was sleek and tapered, perfectly proportioned. Even the eyes, those hard gray eyes, were smiling.
“I’ll take it,” he joked. “Wrap it up.”
Outside the change room Bouchette found a glass of red wine waiting. And although he was in a damned hurry he smiled, lifting the glass to his lips.
When you bought a custom suit from the best, they gave you the red carpet treatment. Bouchette grunted and lit a Gaulois. This was what life was about. The burgundy carpet must have needed cutting once a week. And there, in the alcove, that painting—what was that damned Dago’s name? Next year, 1981, when all his troubles were over, Bouchette planned to learn about painting. Men with real class always had paintings by the Masters. Pictures you could look at, not splotches of color on canvas. Yeah, that one there was the real thing.
Good Luck Made to Measure. Real Strength in Every Stitch. Twenty years ago Blake Tobey emigrated from some Italian town with a little cash, a lot of drive—and a name a smart man would get rid of. Alfonso Cocomicci? Francisco Della Parmigiana? Bouchette could not remember. But five years later Blake Tobey had certainly arrived. A high-class store. A sleek new look. And a slogan that was instantly on everybody’s lips.
Blake Tobey did not advertise. Blake Tobey did not franchise. “Let ’em come to me,” he said. And come they did to his one store. Blake Tobey’s clientele included heads of state, actors, singers, boxers, front-page millionaires. Yes, any man who wanted Good Luck Made to Measure knew where to go in Toronto.
It occurred to Bouchette that many things might have been different if he had come here last year. Or three years ago. Or five. It would have been nice being thirty with the world by the balls in a suit such as this. Eight years he’d been away. Too long! Hell, Cole might not even remember.
Uh-uh. Bouchette shook his head. Ten grand was ten grand to a loan shark.
Still, what was the worst Cole could do?
Strike that. He’d seen firsthand what Cole could do, with a deadbeat in a crowded bar.
Bouchette began to pace, angry with these thoughts. Cole was a maudit, for sure; but he, Jean-Paul, was the devil himself. And now his luck would surely change, just as the old witch had promised back home. From the moment he’d closed the suit jacket’s last button he’d known that he was on a roll. And it would see him through a danger far more pressing than one shark.
Bouchette shuffled away from the window. And in the move he dropped his glass. What had ever possessed him to stand there, exposed?
“Eh bien.” Horace had come back to see the spilled wine. “Same color as the rug.”
Yes, another brilliant move, spilling his wine like a schoolboy, and in a joint like this! Bouchette took an even breath. Slow down…Just a minute…He couldn’t have been spotted by the nègre with the toque. Not in the seconds he’d stood there.
He withdrew a silver money clip, from which he slipped Horace a C-note. “For the service,” he said.
“Merci.”
“And the French.”
Horace bowed, proferring Bouchette’s brown leather bag. “For another hundred I can speak Nippongo.”
“No. But do me a favor.”
“Done.”
“I need to use the back door.”
It was warm for April, jacket-wearing weather. Bouchette slipped out into the alley that ran behind the row of shops. At Dundas he checked gingerly, then headed for the subway, his gray leather Guccis making little squeaks. At Bloor he could hail a cab safely and still get to the airport in time.
At the bottom of the stairs he rounded the corner to the turnstile and cashier. Halfway there he realized that he’d left his cashmere coat behind. Through clenched teeth he muttered, “Merde.” Not for the coat but the plane ticket in the left breast pocket.
To the left then he felt the slight rustle that signaled an oncoming train. He could be on it in seconds and gone. And after that, in minutes…
The rustle turned into a hair-tossing breeze. The crowd huddled in on the platform. He jump-cut to draw a quick bead on the stairs. Finally, he focused on the gray subway lockers. It never hurt to be street-smart, and he just might have need of his hands.
Bouchette stashed the suit, fumbling till his palms held far too little change. He’d have to break a bill.
Allons!
Leaving the suit, he sprinted to the booth for change. The cashier was still breaking the twenty when Bouchette heard the voices.
“There he is!”
“Over there!”
And as the breeze turned into wind Bouchette looked over to see three men, one with a Major League slugger.
Ordinarily Bouchette would have stood his ground. Three weren’t much rougher than two, all in all. But this time an inner voice whispered, You shouldn’t have come here at all. Not in 1980.
A desperate look at the locker. An oath. And then Bouchette sprang into action, bounding over the turnstile, past the cashier’s startled cry. The train doors had already started to open. He bulleted toward the last car, firing through the scrambles of those who saw him coming. And the cries of two women who did not.
Just once he looked over his shoulder to see the nègre barreling in on his heels. From somewhere near the front of the train a long whistle sounded. Two shorts and the doors would close.
Bouchette reached into his jacket for the long knife’s ivory handle. The whistle sounded once again. As he ran, he flipped the knife and whirled, pulling his arm into place. The whistle sounded one last time. He hurled the knife, heard the scream, and dove through the closing subway car door.
When they pulled away he saw the nègre writhing, white choppers flashing as he clasped his groin.
Bouchette’s grin lasted only a moment, the time it took to scan the receding platform. The other two weren’t there.
With his next curse he pulled all the stops.
The other two were on the train.
CHAPTER TWO
Victor lumbered along Yonge Street, exhausted by another week. In the past six months, since Vivvie’s hiring, his torment had grown daily.
She was foolish, shallow, vulgar. True, but flawlessly constructed of the most exotic pairs: sloe eyes…bowed lips…full breasts…and never-ending legs. A party to remember, with noisemakers and funny hats. On his better days he knew: he was drab and unimportant.
But today had been one of the worst. And he saw no way to accept that he could never have her. Not even for a night. And this seemed the ultimate failure: denial of the chance to fail.
And yet, all around him, men who’d Made It beat the clock. A spry man of sixty sprinted through the yellow light. Well-suited men in their fifties strutted with young foxes, their vigor unimpaired and their chances still intact.
Ah, April had come round again. It had snowed now since November, another dreary forever of drizzle, storm and slop. It went on every year till you couldn’t recall when the weather had been decent—or hope for a day when it turned good again.
Victor stood at the corner of Dundas and Yonge, circling in slow motion. It was Friday, he had to do something!
He hadn’t felt so restless since the day he arrived in Toronto, stoned on the big city streetlights, high on the chances for changes. It wo
He spotted two empty lockers: one at the bottom and one at the top. He slipped his briefcase, then his quarters, in the lower locker. Before he turned the key, though, inner voices started in on him.
(On your knees again, eh?...What’s the matter with the one on top?...Afraid some big lug will come along and sock you if you take it?...Come on, you got here first…)
All right!
He rose to open the top door; looked inside; slammed the door, shocked by what he’d seen inside. Now he’d really done it. Any moment, any second, the punishment would start.
Victor waited, shoulders bunched halfway to his ears. When he finally turned he saw no one but the station cashier with a book. He considered; reconsidered; then, glancing over one shoulder, slowly reopened the door. The breeze of the incoming train teased his hair. A monster could be on that train, coming back as quickly as the wheels allowed.
The breeze of the train was a wind now.
He unzipped the soft leather suit bag an inch; then two; then three.
And though there was no question of his doing the right thing tomorrow, his stealth and speed surprised him now. In a single fluid move he switched the bag with his briefcase below. Turned the key. And split the scene.
One hour later he returned. In half that again he was home with his prize.
CHAPTER THREE
The black Cadillac rolled smoothly along the city’s Harbourfront. And X-ray eyes glancing through the coal dark windows might have turned from what they saw.
In front, a bald black man with a freshly broken nose gripped the wheel intensely while glowering in the mirror. Across from him a silver-haired man with a face like a hardened James Coburn’s sat staring grimly ahead. He adjusted his black leather gloves, then tugged at the sleeves of the jacket that matched.
“You comfortable back there, Bouchette?” A low chuckle. Then a snap as Derek Cole shook out a kerchief, which he handed to the driver. “Try not to bleed on the seat, babe.”
As a matter of fact, Bouchette felt far from comfortable, despite the cotton softness of the sudden April snowfall and Cole’s majestic voice. The two men on either side of him had their arms around his neck, their switchblades at his ribs. He sat upon his sleeping hands.
“You know,” Cole was saying, “you gave my boys quite a run there, my friend.”
“Mon ami,” Bouchette corrected.
“You talk to me in English.”
“Alors, mangez-moi.”
Cole’s head turned. “Charlie, cut one earlobe off the next time he talks dirty.”
Charlie, the thug with the two blackened eyes, made an appreciative sound.
“Yeah, you gave them quite a time,” Cole continued. “Now Ralph’s nose looks just like yours. And Hank there on your right—well, you’ve just made his dentist a really happy guy.”
Hank growled, jabbing the knife through Bouchette’s Daniel Hechter jacket. “Go on, talk dirty, asshole.” Spittle and blood sprayed through gaps where yellow teeth had been.
Cole lit another Camel and blew a perfect smoke ring as Cleo Laine began to sing. “Then again, mon ami, you don’t look so hot either.”
Bouchette could feel that for himself. His left eye was filmy, its lids half sealed. Though no teeth seemed to be missing, his tongue told him several had loosened and his upper lip had split. No one seemed to mind if he bled all over his Pierre Cardin shirt. His right ear had probably doubled in size. He felt half relieved that Charlie would cut on the left.
All in all, Bouchette allowed, this certainly seemed to be it. 19-frigging-80. But you had to admit it was funny.
Cole arched his thick silver eyebrows. “A private joke, Jean-Paul?”
“Yeah, you might say that.”
Cole blew another smoke ring over his left shoulder. “I’d offer you one,” he said drolly, “but I’d rather keep you on edge.” As the car kept rolling he talked on, his voice half as soft at least as the April snow. “You know, I still can’t figure out why the hell you came here. I mean, you’re no Einstein, skipping out owing me money like that. But you were smart enough to stay away. You had it sweet in Montreal, good connections, you were safe. So tell me. Doesn’t really matter—I’d just like to know.”
But why? Cole was one with the force that had called Bouchette here or the force somehow worked through him. A rigged game either way, for sure.
The damndest part of all, though, was how the curse had tricked him. All along he’d been led to believe that this could only happen at home. For centuries the Bouchettes had lived in mortal fear of the year ’80 in Montreal. Now doubly so because the curse had missed last time around. And so it was all the funnier, how he’d been tricked by a slogan:
Good Luck Made to Measure. Real Strength in Every Stitch.
“Yeah, delegation,” Derek Cole was saying. “Pass the buck. It’s not my job. I don’t get paid to do that. Guess I’m a little old-fashioned—”
“Or old?”
Cole chuckled, a low rumble. “Whatever. I mean, 1980 suits me fine in a lot of ways. Where would we be without Master Charge, Barbra, Dolly, Burt, Michael, ‘Dallas’… Ralph,” Cole pointed suddenly, “pull in over there.”
Bouchette watched intently as the black man eased the death car onto the quiet side road.
“But I’m still just a little old-fashioned, or old. I do most of the major collecting myself. Good business, folks knowing the boss gets involved.—Right over there, Ralph.—Yeah, my daddy always told me never get so fat you lose touch with the people.”
Bouchette ignored the banter clearly intended to spook him. The old witch had promised him a way to beat the curse. So he focused as never before on
Good Luck…
The Cadillac came to a Cadillac stop and Cole looked back, eyes twinkling.
“So here we are.”
“And aren’t we brave? Do they hold it for you when you pee?”
Cole’s eyes flashed, his upper lip flattened against his wolfish teeth.
“Sure,” Bouchette continued, “have Charlie cut my ear while I’m sitting on my hands. Look at your men. They’re all messed up. And you there in black leather like—but I don’t want to lose my ear.”
Cole eyed Bouchette a long moment. Then he said in a low and relaxed tone of voice, “You know, I really like my work. And this is going to take a long time.”
Bouchette’s skin started to tingle. With studied cool he turned his gaze from Cole’s eyes to his razor cut.
“You should ask your hairdresser about Grecian Formula.”
Not the greatest of quips but it did strike a nerve. And Cole snarled as he slipped out his door, “Bring him out.”
Manhandled out of the car, Bouchette started to breathe from his center. And as he did he focused on the bruised, or broken, ribs—filling his lungs with unbroken air. Next, he shook his hands and felt them start to fill with fresh strong blood. Good, good, very good. And here was something better still: he filled his toes and feet with flashes of the thousands of kicks he had done. But still he felt cold and a little afraid.
Come on, witch, be true to me and your goddamned crystal ball!
Cole waited at the trunk, in black down to his stomping boots. The thick leather would absorb the shock of many blows. A kneecap would be the best place to begin.
“Come over here,” Cole said.
In the trunk, besides the spare, the tire iron and a large gray strongbox—the right size for a shotgun—Bouchette saw two Louisville sluggers.
“Gee, I used to love baseball when I was a kid,” Cole said. “The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd. Go on, take your pick.”
Bouchette inspected the bat on the right as best he could with freezing hands. Well, adrenaline would warm them soon. He locked eyes with each of Cole’s men, all propped against the Cadillac. Their eyes told him nothing he wanted to hear. A ship sounded mournfully in the Toronto harbor. Bouchette sensed his time had arrived.
