Brian Thomsen & Martin H. Greenberg (ed), page 19
“Enjoy your day, Danetti,” he added as he stepped into the shower.
Danetti wasn’t expecting any evidence to be recovered, but he sat at his desk willing the phone to ring, or the fax to spring to life. Mindlessly he flipped through the file in front of him. Tiny Joe was a smalltime player like the others, now just another entry in a list that read like a bad mob movie: Jack the Knife, Tony the Tyrannical, One-Eyed Sly, along with eighteen others who had all done a stint in the morgue before being released for burial.
Instinctively, Danetti knew this would be the same as the rest in other aspects as well. No prints, no weapon, no suspects—officially. The M.O. was identical: killed at night in the bedroom, a single clean knife wound to the heart. No sign of forced entry. No sign of a struggle. No weapon left at the scene. A perfect hit. A perfect job. It was a mob hit all right, that was easy to guess by the victims’ common occupations, but—rumors aside—there was no way to prove anything else without a doer.
Still, Danetti knew who had done the hit.
Ivan. Ivan the Bloody. Ivan the Terrible.
The evidence, or lack thereof, proved it.
Danetti would stake his life on it. Which was exactly what he intended to do.
When a call finally came, Danetti answered it before it finished its first ring.
“Danetti,” he half yelled into the phone.
His boss’s cigar-deepened voice began without preamble, “I’m pulling the surveillance on Ivan’s penthouse. The job that went down last night, it wasn’t him. He was holed up at midnight. Lights out at one twenty-seven. No movement after that until you were half way through the crime scene this morning. Then it’s the usual, him singing to you. Bugs is bugs, Danetti. We got the best up there, and he didn’t move. It’s not him, Danetti. Find me another suspect.”
The dial tone sounded before Danetti could say a word. Not that he could think of one to say. He slammed down the phone and reached for his bottle of Turns.
“Pizza!” The intercom had buzzed and the doorman announced the delivery as Ivan was scanning the paper. No news interested him.
He opened the door and accepted the pizza box, handing the delivery man a twenty. Both men nodded silently, and Ivan closed the door carefully, knowing that the snick of the latch would be recorded on Danetti’s bugs.
“Snick for you, snack for me, Danetti!” sang Ivan.
Back in the kitchen, Ivan put a forkful of scrambled eggs in his mouth and lifted the pizza box lid. Atop the stack of crisp bills sat a note reading, “For a job well done.” Ivan put the note on the newspaper and picked up the money. He put the top three one hundred dollar bills in his pocket and walked with the rest to his wall safe mounted behind a gold framed Salvador Dali. An original, not a print.
He didn’t bother to count the bills. He knew they would all be there.
Then he ate the note.
Turning toward the kitchen counter where he’d found one of the many police bugs, be belched loudly and laughed. He had what he called a “dream job.”
Literally.
Danetti looked across the dimly lit table at his snitch. He was disgusted, as usual, by the sight of this scruffy little weasel of a man who stayed out of jail only as long as the free-flowing stream of information he fed Danetti was correct. Today the weasel was scared. Danetti played with his handcuffs as a reminder of the ever present threat of jail. He was angry.
“Tell me something useful,” he demanded of his snitch.
“It was him, Danetti, I swear it on my mother’s life and the life of my sisters, all six of them, and well not my brother, ‘cause he’d kill me if he heard me swearing, and I don’t know how The Terrible did it without leaving his place, he’s like scary like that, can be at two places at one time and I don’t know, but I know, because my brother delivered the money to him personally, thirty Gs, and it was brought there just this morning, but you wouldn’t tell my brother I told you would you, because jail would …”
Danetti silenced the weasel with a cold stare. He stood, threw two bills on the table and turned to leave. He didn’t look back, but he knew his voice would carry.
“You’d better be right …” and he left the threat to resonate in his wake.
Ivan had time on his hands. Standing at his balcony railing, he sipped some dry sherry from an ornate crystal goblet and watched the stars over the river.
He sighed. His life seemed perfect. He wanted for no material comforts. He had a string of gorgeous women who were at his disposal in a moment’s notice. His job was secure because no one could do it better than he could. And his alibis were provided by the NYPD and their handy little critters discreetly planted in every room of his house.
“To bugs,” Ivan said, lifting the glass in a mock toast.
But Ivan was not completely happy. He had no one to share his successes with, no one to brag to. He longed for an intellectual equal, and a challenge of some sort.
He threw the glass over the railing and went back inside, not even waiting to hear it shatter in the courtyard thirty-six floors below. The sherry glass had been part of a perfect Edwardian set of crystal brought over from England. But what did he care? He could always buy more.
Easy.
That was the problem. It was all too easy.
Ivan sighed again. Though it was early still, he retired to his bedroom and slipped into bed in his handmade teal silk pajamas. Three hundred dollars, shipped in from the Orient. Silk on the silk sheet.
To dream.
“No more, Danetti. Go home.” The direct order from Jake behind the bar left no room for discussion.
Danetti was soused. He knew it. Jake had confirmed it. Nothing to do but stumble home. It was a good thing he could find the way home with his eyes tied behind his back, or something like that.
It took him a couple of minutes to get the key in the lock. His hand was shaking, and he had to close one eye and aim for the middle key hole. One lock. One small lock. He had nothing left to steal. Mary Katherine, his good Catholic wife who hadn’t believed in divorce, had taken everything in the settlement.
It took him another long minute to drag his body to the pull-out sofa which served as his bed. It was lucky he hadn’t folded it up earlier since he had neither the desire nor the dexterity to unfold it in his current state. He slumped down onto the bed and fell into a whiskey-induced sleep in the middle of untying his shoe.
Ivan was in bed when Danetti woke him. He sat up slowly in his perfectly creased deep blue Armani suit and thin burgundy tie. Danetti was wearing his dress blues with his gold shield prominently displayed over his heart. His hand was at ready by his weapon.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Danetti,” Ivan said. His voice mangled the vowels. He raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”
Danetti drew his gun and trained it on Ivan. His hand was rock steady.
“How do you do it, Ivan?” Danetti spit the words out and watched them spatter and fall to the ground at the feet of the impeccably dressed Czech.
Ivan’s laughter started like ice tinkling on the sides of a glass, but increased in volume and intensity until it rang in Danetti’s head.
Danetti looked around as if to see where the surreal noise was coming from and in that brief momentary loss of concentration, Ivan reached up and caressed the gun in Danetti’s hands. His hand went over the top of the barrel and under it. He ran a finger down its length and sighed.
All the while, the laughter bounced off each of the bedroom walls, seeming to chase itself and splinter into a dozen voices.
Desperate to stop the source of the noise, Danetti closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.
Silence.
“It’s over,” Danetti thought. Maybe even said it out loud.
But something was wrong.
There was no more laughter, but there had been no clap of gun fire either.
He opened his eyes slowly.
Ivan was standing in front of him. No wounds, no blood, but at least no more laughter.
“Until you believe this is my reality, you cannot stop me,” Ivan stated. He reached behind him to the antique claw-footed nightstand and opened its single drawer.
Shaking his head just slightly as if to clear the fog, Danetti leaned toward the table and peered in the drawer. A glint of light caught his eye, and he saw a knife partially wrapped in crimson velvet.
The knife.
Danetti knew it was the murder weapon. He could feel his certainty in the cold fingers that ran up his spine and danced on the back of his neck.
He looked up at Ivan.
“Until you believe this is my reality, you cannot stop me.”
The repeated statement came again and again, as if they were in some sort of cave or echo chamber.
Danetti reached for the knife, and Ivan made no move to stop him.
Just as Danetti touched the cold steel of the blade, the knife began sinking in upon itself, growing farther and farther away from Danetti’s outstretched hand.
Danetti gasped in a huge gulp of air and sat bolt upright. Instinctively, he tried to jump to a defensive position, but his shoe lace—still half untied—had wound itself around the arm of the couch, and Danetti hit the floor shoulder first. All the air rushed back out of his body in a great “humph!” He was stone cold sober.
Ivan also awoke with a start. A bead of sweat etched a line from his temple to his jawline. It was still dark out.
He lay wide awake staring into the darkness for hours. When daylight finally came, threading its way through the city highrises to knot itself in Ivan’s room, he stood. His silk pajamas were badly creased, but he didn’t notice.
Pulling open the drawer in the antique claw-footed night table, he lifted out a crimson scarf and brought it to his nose. He took a deep breath as if he could smell something, some clue, in the velvet. A smile crept from his eyes slowly, ever so slowly, down to his lips.
“Challenge,” he said simply to the ever listening electronic ears of his bedroom. “Made. Accepted.” There was hardly any Czech accent in the three words.
Danetti thought a shower would clear his head. But it didn’t. The dream’s intensity did not diminish in the jets of steaming water.
He even tried to go back to sleep, lying prone and rigid on the pull-out couch. But sleep wouldn’t come.
He arrived at his office two hours earlier than he was scheduled instead of his usual twenty minutes late. If anyone was surprised, the scowl on his face discouraged questions. The red lines that looked badly stitched across the whites of his eyes kept the others silent.
He had pulled his file on Ivan and was well into it when his captain shuffled up to his desk.
“Find me a suspect on the Jerome case?” It wasn’t the question that bothered Danetti, but the tone.
“I have a suspect.” He shot back. A little too hostile. A little too quick.
His captain ignored him and shuffled away with not so much as another word.
Danetti continued looking through the transcripts of the tapes from Ivan’s surveillance recordings. He knew them by heart and nothing was new to him.
His own name played prominently on every page.
“Good morning, Danetti.”
“Come and get me, Danetti.”
“I expect more from you, Danetti.”
All statements made by Ivan in his heavily accented singsong voice.
“I’m coming, Ivan.” Danetti said aloud. “I’m coming.”
He turned to the photos. Twenty-two bodies in a variety of rooms. Rented rooms. Hotel rooms. Bedrooms.
And a picture of a bedroom without a body—Ivan’s bedroom. Taken while the tech team had planted the bugs.
Danetti had never been in Ivan’s penthouse, but the image on the page in front of him was not new to him. It was etched in his mind from hours of studying the computer photo. There were red grease pencil marks where the bugs had been placed, but that’s not what interested Danetti. What caught his attention in the picture was off to the unfocused corner of the shot. One very fuzzy, but familiar piece of furniture sat next to the bed. Danetti squinted and stared until he teared.
He just couldn’t be sure.
He picked up the phone and punched in an extension.
“O’Reily, I need an image enhanced.”
Ivan wandered the gallery in search of a new piece for his collection. He had called ahead to arrange a private showing, as was gallery policy. He had his eye on a particularly interesting piece. It was a Dali sketch, one which the artist had done well before his surrealist period. The clean lines of the pencil on parchment interested Ivan almost as much as the famous melting clock of Dali’s later works. He couldn’t get his hands on that one, of course. It belonged to a museum in Florida.
Ivan appreciated Dali’s work not so much for the art or the value. There were far more beautiful and expensive pieces in his collection. But Dali, in Ivan’s opinion, was a man who clearly understood the mechanics of dreams.
Maybe even understood Ivan himself.
Perhaps someday, he thought as he counted crisp bills into the gallery owner’s palm, I’ll have the clock painting, too.
Danetti could hardly believe the picture in front of him. It had arrived in a mangled envelope overused for interoffice mail. O’Reily had done a superb job in enhancing the image. Once the object in question had been an almost imperceptible dime-sized smudge. Now, mouth agape, Danetti looked down at a full eight-by-ten picture of an antique claw-footed bedside table with a single drawer. It was the twin of the table he had seen in his dream.
“How could I have known that?”
Detective Fernandez at the desk next to his looked up. “Huh?”
“Nothing, man,” Danetti silently cursed himself. He must be crazy, he thought. He’d been talking to himself far too much lately.
Ivan sat down on his leather sofa and unwrapped his bundle. The sketch in its heavy frame looked even better, he thought, in the subtle lighting of his home. He studied it for a long minute, whistling an aria from La Bohéme loudly.
Then he flipped the picture over and pierced the brown paper on the underside with his thumbnail, whistling La dona é mobile, which masked the slight noise of the ripping.
Carefully he removed a small handwritten note that was folded once.
“Brooklyn Friday Sam Castanetta” was all it said.
Ivan came to the end of the aria, took a deep breath and swallowed the note.
“Friday it is,” he said, directly challenging the bug in the lamp to his right. He would have disappointed if he had known no one was listening.
Danetti stormed out of his captain’s office letting a puff of cigar smoke escape with him. He was so angry the fumes could have been his own. All his surveillance had been cut. Everything. Even the bugs. Danetti hadn’t even had the chance to show his captain the blown up picture, not that he was sure even he believed his own story. And how would he bring it up? “I had this dream… .” Not the stuff of organized crime investigations.
“You’re on your own, Danetti!” His boss called out after him. Danetti just kept walking. Past his desk. Out the door of the station. Past his car. Down to Jake’s.
“You don’t know how right you are, Captain.” He raised his first glass. “You don’t know how right you are.”
Danetti awoke in the closet. It wasn’t unprecedented for him to wake up in a strange place. He’d come to in the bathroom more times than he could remember. And once in a great while in a strange woman’s bedroom. In the hallway in front of his door. On a bar stool. And even once in an alley, badly bruised from a fight, or a fall, or both.
But, in a strange closet? This was a first.
He could recall Jake throwing him out of the bar. “Enough, Danetti. Time for bed.” That much he could remember. But not much more. Was he home? He shook his head.
But, it wasn’t the alcohol he’d consumed that was confusing him. He was disoriented, not drunk. He was sure that he would be able to see straight if he could see.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out a strained light coming from louvered doors. He could feel clothes hanging above him. He was definitely in a closet, but the one small closet in his apartment had solid doors.
As if by instinct, he felt for his weapon. It was there, holstered under his arm. He drew it soundlessly from its sheath. Security!
A new noise startled him. It was subtle, but in the quiet of the closet it seemed to scream.
Gripping hard to the cold steel of his gun, Danetti strained to recognize the foreign sounds. All his energies focused on what he could perhaps recognize. The slide of a lock. The opening of a door.
He put both hands on his weapon and gripped hard. The gun felt strangely malleable. He looked down at the object in his hand. In the semidarkness, he could the outline of what he was holding: a lethal tasseled loafer!
He dropped the shoe and darkness closed over him, a palpable darkness, as warm and soft as a baby’s blanket. He was unarmed in an unrecognizable dark closet. A cry of desperation, like an infant’s cry in the night, almost escaped his lips.
Ivan had become accustomed to the surreal nature of his dreams. Though he had been taken in by them as a child—floating above the stairs, landing in fields that should not have been under him—it had been many years since he had learned to control the dreams. Now he could block the sounds and concentrate on manipulating the realities.
Upon opening the door of Sam Castanetta’s apartment, he barely noticed the flying lights and the other odd aspects. All he saw was the man on the bed—the sole reason for his being in this place.
Crossing to the sleeping man’s bed, he stepped over seven stones and waded through an orange river that might have stopped someone less accustomed to the language of dreams.
He drew a cloaked crimson object from his jacket pocket.
