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...Hazar--Triple himself--an Ur-Dravidian opening line of dialogue, addressed to his image in a mirror, is this: "Behold, dips and dew-heads, the baddest, blackest bindle-bopper to bo your peep."
He's a dropper, contract-style, working this evening for the Solatzo sect. Blades are his specialty--the shiv, the ice pick, the Flora Dora. His mark is Terry "Little T" Blount, a thief built like a flagpole, and an hour before Triple H guts him in the alley, the half-loaf is camped at a burp-n-urp on Euclid Avenue in New Cleveland, Khalid and Ling's O-Town of Music, nearly twenty large in the breast pocket of his Omar Sharif. The stotinki, of course, is ill-gotten gelt, two K of which are the tala-taka for a patty-cake Open Sesame at a poobah's palace off the Forbidden Square. Little T is jumpy--"sweating bullets," you're tempted to say--and is medicating himself with corn from the well. When he's not making too loud chitchat with the bar rag, Lonesome Abe, he's trying to figure out, given the givens of the wide and craven world, who to hose first. Seventeen thousand samolians, after all, buys a lot of loose. A lot of uptown leg. A lot of downtown boogaloo. A shoofly as financially fit as he could trip some beaucoup light fantastic. Still, what complicates his thinking is that of late he, too, has been in the employ, albeit sporadic, of the Solatzos, in particular of the High Pillow himself, Don Marco, an elder too wrathful even for the Old Testament. A "hard man," the Brunos say. Specifically, The Don has put the fear of God into Little T--fear with a head and tail and impressively large teeth. It's fear with lots of x's and y's in it, a parlez-vous more spit than speech. So here the hooch-head is, Little T, breath ragged, heart rattling, gorge in the gullet--only time, he suspects, between him and an ugly end. And here he comes, out of the dive, looking both ways--at once, if possible--he a disease with mucous and red eyes and clammy feet.
The atmospherics are minimal--mizzling rain, light sufficient enough to see how alone you are, the scrape and hiss and clatter, all the effects you expect in this genre--and Little T is making his way to his bucket, a bona fide land yacht (a Volgograd with custom largo and rust on the kootenai), which is parked around the corner. Several steps behind, hewing to the shadows, follows Triple H, whose brain, we're to infer, is part fish, part ferret. You can't imagine him as a boy, at least not an unarmed boy or otherwise coffee-and-doughnut. When Little T reaches his iron--you can all but hear his quote big sigh of relief unquote--Triple H makes his move: the Damascus high in the back, free arm around the neck, trap close to the trapper.
"Into the alley, sweat sock," he growls. Little T goes wet in the whistle. What else can he do? A force of nature, irrational and heartless as a hurricane, has him throttled, something perilously sharp digging hard into the tender flesh between his wings.
"The Don?" he says.
"None other," says Triple H, spinning Little T around. Harbee prefers the face-to-face, respects the various truths, ripe or raw, you can read in the eyes of...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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