Big Trouble

By the late 1990s, with the Russian economy melting down, Ivan and Leonid decided to move their operation abroad, and they settled on South Florida. They had visited the area when they had worked on the submarine deal, and they liked the warm weather. They also liked the seaport and airport, which were very hospitable to the international businessperson; if you dealt with the right people, you could bring in almost anything, including probably live human slaves, without having to answer a bunch of pesky questions from Customs. Guns were easy. Ivan and Leonid always got a kick out of going through the airport security checkpoint, seeing surly personnel in bad-fitting blazers grimly scrutinizing the Toshiba laptops of certified public accountants, while, in the cargo tunnels a few feet below, crates containing weapons that could bring down a building were whizzing past like shit through a goose.

So Ivan and Leonid, now calling themselves John and Leo, became the proprietors of the Jolly Jackal. They found it amusing to be, once again, in the field of recreational beverages. And the bar was good cover for their real business: Random people could come and go at all hours, and nobody official cared what was going on, as long as John and Leo paid off the various municipal inspectors. The only downside to owning a bar, they found, was that people sometimes came in and actually wanted to buy drinks. But Leo was able to keep that to a minimum via a combination of poor service and occasionally hitting patrons with his bat.

Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your "collectors" and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit.

But their best local customer, by far, was a local outfit that was always in the market for serious, big-ticket weapons, the kind of weapons real armies fight real wars with. John and Leo had no idea why anybody in Miami would need so much firepower, nor did they care. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was that when they got hold of a serious weapon, this outfit would usually buy it, no haggling, for cash.

The man who delivered the cash was the man who walked into the Jolly Jackal with the briefcase while Puggy was watching the couples argue about lip fuzz on Jerry Springer. Leo, standing at the cash register, nodded as the man walked past. John rose from his table and quietly greeted the customer by name.

"Hello, Mr. Herk," he said.

It was, indeed, Arthur Herk, spouse abuser, embezzler, and legal owner of Puggy's tree. Arthur's employer, Penultimate, Inc., builder of faulty buildings, was John and Leo's big local customer. The reason Penultimate was buying weapons—in fact the whole reason Penultimate existed in the first place—was that it was planning to take over Cuba once Fidel was dead. Quite a few organizations in South Florida, not to mention Cuba, were planning to do this. One thing you could say for sure about post-Castro Cuba: It would not lack for leadership.

Arthur was the bag man for Penultimate. That was pretty much his entire mid-level-executive job: delivering bribes and other illegal payments. He had done this job reasonably well until a few months before, when his gambling problem had begun to get out of hand. He'd come out of work one day and found two men waiting for him in the parking lot; they'd informed him that, unless he came up with a very specific amount of money within twenty-four hours, they would have no choice but to remove one of his fingers without benefit of anesthetic. They'd taken Arthur around to the back of their car, opened the trunk, and made him look inside. On the floor of the trunk was a pair of pruning shears. Arthur peed his pants.