Garden of Beasts

The one who’d spoken to him on the phone was named Andrew Avery, aman with rosy cheeks and deliberate, sharp eyes. Eyes of a boxer, though Paul knew he’d never been in a fistfight in his life. The other was Vincent Manielli, dark, with a voice that told Paul they’d probably grown up in the same section of Brooklyn. Manielli and Avery didn’t look much older than the stickball kids in front of Paul’s building, but they were, of all things, lieutenants in the navy. When Paul had been in France the lieutenants he’d served under had been grown men.
    Their pistols were in holsters but the leather flaps were undone and they kept their hands near their weapons.
    The older officer, sitting across from him on the couch, was pretty high up—a naval commander, if the gingerbread on his uniform was the same as it’d been twenty years ago.
    The door opened and an attractive woman in a white navy uniform entered. The name on her blouse was Ruth Willets. She handed him a file. “Everything’s in there.”
    “Thank you, Yeoman.”
    As she left, without glancing at Paul, the officer opened the file, extracted two pieces of thin paper, read them carefully. When he finished, he looked up. “I’m James Gordon. Office of Naval Intelligence. They call me Bull.”
    “This is your headquarters?” Paul asked. “‘The Room’?”
    The commander ignored him and glanced at the other two. “You introduced yourselves yet?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “There was no trouble?”
    “None, sir.” Avery was doing the talking.
    “Take his cuffs off.”
    Avery did so while Manielli stood with his hand near his gun, edgily eyeing Paul’s gnarled knuckles. Maniellihad fighter’s hands too. Avery’s were pink as a dry-goods clerk’s.
    The door swung open again and another man walked inside. He was in his sixties but as lean and tall as that young actor Marion and Paul had seen in a couple of films, Jimmy Stewart. Paul frowned. He knew the face from articles in the Times and the Herald Tribune. “Senator?”
    The man responded, but to Gordon: “You said he was smart. I didn’t know he was well-informed.” As if he wasn’t happy about being recognized. The Senator looked Paul up and down, sat and lit a stubby cigar.
    A moment later yet another man entered, about the same age as the Senator, wearing a white linen suit that was savagely wrinkled. The body it encased was large and soft. He carried a walking stick. He glanced once at Paul then, without a word to anyone, he retreated to the corner. He too looked familiar but Paul couldn’t place him.
    “Now,” Gordon continued. “Here’s the situation, Paul. We know you’ve worked for Luciano, we know you’ve worked for Lansky, a couple of the others. And we know what you do for them.”
    “Yeah, what’s that?”
    “You’re a button man, Paul,” Manielli said brightly, as if he’d been looking forward to saying it.
    Gordon said, “Last March Jimmy Coughlin saw you . . .” He frowned. “What do you people say? You don’t say ‘kill.’”
    Paul, thinking: Some of us people say “chill off.” Paul himself used “touch off.” It was the phrase that Sergeant Alvin York used to describe killing enemy soldiers during the War. It made Paul feel less like a punk to use the term that a war hero did. But, of course, Paul Schumann didn’t share any of this at the moment.
    Gordon continued. “Jimmy saw you kill Arch Dimici on March thirteenth in a warehouse on the Hudson.”
    Paul had staked out the place for four hours before Dimici showed up. He’d been positive the man was alone. Jimmy must’ve been sleeping one off behind some crates when Paul arrived.
    “Now, from what they tell me, Jimmy isn’t the most reliable witness. But we’ve got some hard evidence. A few revenue boys picked him up for selling hooch and he made a deal to rat on you. Seems he’d picked up a shell casing at the scene and was keeping it for insurance. No prints’re on it—you’re too smart for that. But Hoover’s people ran a test on your Colt. The scratches from the extractor’re the same.”
    Hoover? The FBI was involved? And they’d already tested the gun. He’d pitched it out of Malone’s window less than an hour ago.
    Paul rocked his upper and lower teeth against each other. He was furious with himself. He’d searched for a half hour to find that damn casing at the Dimici job and had finally concluded it’d fallen through the cracks in the floor into the Hudson.
    “So we