The Frumious Bandersnatch полностью

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” Ollie said. “We only went out once togeth…”

“El Zorro Canoso. Twenty-four years old, he’s got a full head of gray hair already, probably because he’s worried about being sent upstate for a long time. But guess what? Nobody’s home. We go in with a warrant, but nobody’s there. The place is empty. El Zorro Canoso has flown El Coopo. Next thing I know, Cathy comes around wearing a silk Fuck-Me dress she bought at Juno’s on Jeff Av, and these high-heeled whore shoes that are all straps, I ask her did somebody die and leave her a fortune? She tells me she hit the numbers, which was bullshit because I knew she never played the numbers. What it turns out…”

“She ratted out your bust,” Ollie said.

“How’d you guess? The morning after I told her about it, Tuesday morning this is, the day of the bust this is, she runs to her former husband’s cousin, whose name happens to be Bernardo Herrera, who is guess who?”

“Zorro.”

“Bingo, you shoulda been a detective. Her ex-hubby’s fuckin cousin is El Zorro Canoso, who runs the posse we’re about to bust! He thanks her for being such a good relative, and then he lays five bills on her, which is what I meant when I said she’ll cut off your dick for a nickel and sell it to acuchi frito joint.”

“Well, Patricia didn’t cut off my dick,” Ollie said. “For a nickel or however much. In fact, she doesn’t even like cuchi frito. ”

“You’re missing my point, friend. And what’s this on the platter here? It looks like somebody cut off the chef’s dick.”

“That’s the Szechuan beef.”

“It looks like it.”

The men were silent for several moments, eating.

“So did you get in?” Parker asked.

“Come on, what kind of talk is that?”

“I’m curious,” Parker said, and lowered his voice, and leaned across the table, and said, “Well, didja?”

“Come on, Andy,” Ollie said, and sort of jerked his head over his shoulder and slitted his eyes at the booth behind him.

“Nobody can hear us,” Parker said.

“We better hurry here,” Ollie said. “The judge said one-thirty, didn’t he?”

Parker looked at him.

“What?” Ollie said.

Parker kept looking at him.

“Nothing,” he said at last, and went back to his lunch.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in fifteen years, Carella wanted to smoke a cigarette.

Anything but sitting here on his hands.

The four men who’d been sent to find Rosalita Guadajillo were back.

“Lady’s clean as a whistle,” Forbes reported. “She runs a little jewelry boutique on Mason Avenue, up there in La Perlita, sells mostly cheap crap from third-world countries. She went to call her kids last night around ten-thirty, fished in her handbag, no cell phone. Somebody stole it.”

“Our man,” Corcoran said, nodding.

“Smart,” Endicott said.

“He knew we’d be tracing the call…”

“Even if he made it from a mobile…”

“So he made it from somebody else’s phone…”

“Which is now undoubtedly at the bottom of the river,” Endicott concluded.

“Which means all your equipment here is worthless,” Loomis said, waving his hand at the gear they’d set up all over the room.

“Not entirely,” Endicott said. “When he calls again…”

“If he calls again,” Loomis said.

“Oh, he’ll call,” Corcoran said. “The name of the game is money. Until he gets his money, he’ll keep calling.”

“And when he calls, we’ll be taping it,” Endicott said. “Voice prints are admissible evidence. We take this guy to trial…”

“I don’t care about taking him to trial,” Loomis said. “I already told you that. All I want is Tamar back.”

“Oh, we’ll get her back, all right,” Corcoran assured him.

“I don’t want her endangered in any way. I want to give them the money, get her back, and that’s that.”

“Or vice versa,” Endicott said.

Loomis looked at him.

“Sometimes it’s better to get the victim back first, ” Endicott explained.

“Or simultaneously,” Corcoran said.

“Or at least get proof of life,” Endicott said.

“Proof that she’s still alive,” Corcoran explained. “An ear, or a finger, or…”

Barney Loomis went suddenly pale.

Carella wondered what the hell he was doing here.

YEARS AGO in the police department, long before he’d joined the force, a commonly accepted axiom was that if you weren’t Irish, you’d never “cop the gold.” In this case, “cop” wasn’t an abbreviation of “copper,” which might have made for some nice metallurgical imagery. Instead, “cop” meant to achieve or to obtain, or more specifically to be promoted from a uniformed officer to a detective carrying a gold shield. In this city, so rare was the occurrence of anyone not Irish copping the gold, that whenever it did happen to an outsider, the surprised recipient (regardless of his religious beliefs) was automatically asked “Who’s your rabbi?”