The question hung there like the last chocolate chip cookie on the plate: you pick it up and, right or wrong, you are out of options.
For a good part of my life, I had been on the other side of the table watching as the mark, or some bit player in the show, wrestled with the question.
Knuckles or knees? It was the same question you got if they caught you trying to be too clever in the casinos. It would never be enough to give them their money back, they wanted to make sure you never forgot them.
Naturally, it always fell to me to hold the bat or the hammer, and stare down the guy on the other side without expression. They had to believe that, given the nod, I wasn't going to hold back.
I only ever had to do it once, actually follow through.
It was the time Cinnamon went missing.
She had disappeared in Berlin and Jim was convinced the other side had her.
I wasn't so sure.
I figured she'd gone shopping, or maybe met someone in that way that she had.
We could find ourselves in the worst kind of shit hole and Cinnamon always seemed to be able to smoke out some minor celebrity or member of the local elite. Unlike some of us, Cinnamon always slept indoors. Barney said once that she was the only person he knew that could find a marquis in a minefield.
Barney didn't make a lot of jokes.
I can't really complain because tat talent of hers saved our bacon more than once, but I also couldn't get that worked up if she went dark without telling any of us.
Paranoia is just a fact of life in that life. You spend so much time looking over your shoulder that you can easily become convinced that somebody is looking back. And you can't ignore it because of the one time you might be right.
She's late for a meet and, immediately, Jim is in full defensive mode. He wants to roll up the operation and bug out.
We learned early on that when he got like that there was no arguing with him. It didn't matter how close we were to closing a mark, if Jim even smelled a tail or someone changed their mind in a way he hadn't planned for, he had us heading for the exits.
This time started like every other time when Cinnamon pulled a no-show. We did the usual: we checked her crib, called her numbers and checked out the players she had been working. Everything seemed to be on the level.
She was probably just shacked up with some baron....
And then we found the car she'd been using. It was parked several blocks away from her crib. Nothing unusual there--standard protocol really--but it was where she had parked it.
It was on one of those side streets lined with row houses and dead-ending in the Wall.
According to Jim, it was not a prearranged signal, but it still felt like someone was trying to tell us something.
Barney swept the car for bugs and passive trackers: clean.
That freaked Jim out.
That's how we found out that he had trackers on all of us. Not like the stuff they use nowadays, these were super low-frequency jobs--about the size of a shoebox--that tapped into the battery. Nowadays the bugs they have can post what you had for breakfast all over the internet, but then, the best you could get is if you were about a block away you could tell if we were, or were not, where we said we would be.
That Cinnamon's car didn't register on his black box meant that the sweepers had taken his shoebox too.
This was real.
This was also at a time when we were expected to be squeaky clean. The Secretary was waiting for the Church Committee report to find out exactly how much of the laundry was going to see the light of day and nobody wanted to give anybody an excuse.
Jim was in a corner and he knew it. He couldn't stay and he couldn't leave. It comes out that one of ours was working in the open in Berlin and the stink would be on everybody and everything.
It was against everything that he knew to be right, but we had to find her and find her quickly.
The gloves were off.
Jim called out all the Hartford boys and, together, we burned down network after network looking for anyone who could lead us to Cinnamon and the people who had her.
And we didn't lack for leads.
Perhaps it had something to do with the price of gas, or something, but it was like everybody we got to wanted to talk, they just didn't have anything we needed.
We really didn't get any traction until we started in on Cinnamon's old fashion contacts. Like I said, she had a way of knowing people who knew people.
We started with some piece-of-shit-camera-assistant and worked our way up to what we later found out was a sleeping triple run by the Canadians.
Can you believe it? The fucking Canadians...? Still can't believe it.
Found out later that this guy was an asset developed out of the Gouzenko defection.
Nobody knew anything about this guy.
Well, until we found him, that is.
That was the guy sitting across the table from me.
He represented himself as a cultural liaison who led tours for western scholars to various historic sites on the other side of the curtain. It was a perfect cover.
In any other circumstances, he would have been an ideal candidate for one of Jim's elaborate plays, but, with multiple governments and an alphabet soup of security agencies breathing down our necks, we didn't have time for subtlety.
We needed an entree to the people who had Cinnamon and we were pretty sure that this was our carte de visite.
Jim felt certain that the guy had been trained so we weren't going to get much out of him, but we could set him up to report back to his handlers on the other side.
So, a couple of the Hartford boys dragged him into the well-known darkened room and, after they cuffed him to the chair, Jim gave me the nod.
The guy caught the look and immediately started talking.
Did we know who he was? Who were we to take him from his place of business? Didn't we know he had friends? Had we any idea how sorry we were going to be? All the same old, same old....
I uncuffed his right hand and, with my hand around his wrist, I forced his hand to the table.
He tried to twist himself into a knot, as if to get as far away from me as possible.
With my free hand, I picked up the ball-peen hammer.
I remember thinking it felt like slamming a glass jar down on a wet sponge.
Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate, triquetral, lunate, scaphoid: they shattered like heavy china as I buried the rounded tip of the hammer into that helpless hand.
His is one of the screams....
Still.
After about fifteen seconds, he passed out.
I didn't figure I'd pass out, but then again, I am not as young as I used to be so I had no way of knowing how I was going to take it.
If I could take it....
There was a moment when I actually thought it might do me some good. I have the arthritis bad in both hands, but mostly in that hand so, I thought, it might just do me some good....
It didn't.
Didn't squirm either.
Not sure how I pulled that off, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.
I'm not saying it was a picnic; don't get me wrong. Definitely not a picnic, but really, who gets to be our age and doesn't have at least one fucked up hand?
