“I’m not sure she’s up to it,” she tells him. “It’s all she’s talked about all afternoon - the kitten and this new friend of yours, Carmine.”
“Carmen.”
“Carmen. Don’t you think it’s a little soon for that? What with Shirley dead only three months?”
“It’s not like that,” he assures her.
“I’m not telling you how to run your life, Michael. But it’s all very confusing for Kelly. What kind of a name is Carmine, anyway? Not Jewish, certainly.”
“Tell me about Kelly,” he says.
“She tries so hard to be brave, but I can see she’s in pain again. And her eyes - she keeps squinting, like the lights are too bright. I’ve got it so dark in here, I can barely see. You want to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on.”
He does, and in a minute he hears his daughter’s “Hi, Daddy.” She sounds weak and far away.
“Hi, angel. How are you doing?”
“Okay,” she says, but he has to press the phone hard against his ear to hear her.
“Do you want me to come over and get you, or would you rather wait till tomorrow, when you’re feeling better?”
There’s a short silence, then her voice again. “Would it be okay to wait until tomorrow?”
“Of course it is.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
His nose suddenly feels as it’s been punched, and he’s glad she’s not there to see his eyes fill up. “Angel,” he says, “I am never, never, never, never mad at you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Daddy.”
Even before he reaches the door of his apartment, Goodman detects the aroma of home cooking. He can’t quite identify the dish - it seems to be somewhere between brisket and vegetable soup - but its effect on him is nothing short of invigorating.
He lets himself in, and the aroma hits him full blast. He is all but drawn to the kitchen end of the room, where Carmen turns her head to smile at him over her shoulder. She’s wearing a tiny pair of shorts, the kind that kids make by cutting off the legs from faded jeans - he can’t remember what they’re called - and a white T-shirt, and she’s barefoot. He wants to say something about how terrific she looks, but he doesn’t trust himself to make it come out sounding right.
“Something sure smells good,” he says instead.
She lifts the lid off a pot and shows him a bubbly brown creation. “I hope you like veal stew,” she says.
The truth is, he’s stayed away from veal, not only because it’s terribly expensive, but because once, driving south through Connecticut, he saw calves chained to what looked like doghouses, and he learned later that they do that so the animals don’t get a chance to develop their muscles before they’re taken to be slaughtered. The thought of a creature living its entire short life like that was too much for him to bear. But now, since Carmen’s gone to all this expense and trouble, he knows he can’t bring that up.
He settles on “It smells absolutely delicious.”
He goes into the bathroom to wash his hands and face. He looks in the mirror, sees the same face he’s been looking at for all of his adult life. A little more drawn now perhaps, a bit thinner in the hair department, where the first hints of gray are beginning to show at the sideburns.
He takes off his glasses and places them on the edge of the sink. He lowers his face, splashes water onto it, rubs it, and reaches behind him for a towel. He pats his skin dry and lowers the towel to dry his hands. The face in the mirror looks a bit younger suddenly, not so bookish - less the stereotypical accountant, perhaps. He leaves his glasses resting on the sink and turns off the light.
“You look better without your glasses,” she smiles as soon as he rejoins her at the stove, where he notices a bottle of red wine. “Can you see without them?”
“Almost as well,” he says. “I started wearing them years ago because I thought they made me look older, more serious.”
“And why on earth would you want to look old and serious?”
“Job interviews,” he explains, breaking off the end of a loaf of sourdough bread she’s bought. “People expect accountants to look like accountants.” The bread is soft and chewy.
“Do you want rice or noodles?” she asks him.
“Whatever,” he says. “Rice, noodles. You decide.”
He walks to the sofa, extracts his copy of the Times from his briefcase, and sits, happy to leave her in charge. But there’s one thing that bothers him.
“Carmen?”
“Yes?”
“Where did all this food come from? I mean, two days ago, you told me you had no money. All of a sudden, you’re showing up with veal.”
She leaves the stove and comes over to the sofa, where she stands directly in front of him. “What did you do this afternoon, Michael?”
He shrugs before answering, “I went to work.”
“Me, too,” she smiles.
“What kind of work?”
“Work,” she says. “And if that calls for a cross-examination, can it at least wait until after dinner?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m glad you’ve got a job. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“I know,” she smiles. “I didn’t mean to jump.” And she leans forward and kisses his forehead lightly before returning to her cooking.
He tries to immerse himself in the sports section, but can think only of her lips touching his forehead. He vows not to be the one to bring up her job.
The veal tastes every bit as good as it smelled, cruelty to animals notwithstanding. She’s cooked it with these sweet baby onions, carrots, and other vegetables he can’t name, and ladled it over rice. The sourdough bread is even better warmed up, and the wine is smooth and wonderful.
“Bravo,” he tells her, giddy on his second glass. “Where did you learn to cook like that?”
“My mother, my grandmother,” she says. “Cooking was very important in my family.” He sees her reach for the wine bottle, but the gentleman in him tries to get there first so that he can pour for her. But his aim is slightly off the mark, and he ends up knocking the bottle sideways, spilling the last of its contents onto the tablecloth that was once a towel.
“Marron’!” she laughs, jumping up and out of the way.
“No damage,” he assures her. Together they clear the dishes, and Goodman relegates the tablecloth to the hamper in the bathroom.
She washes while he dries, and they settle on the sofa while coffee brews in an improvised coffeemaker, complete with a single layer of paper towel Carmen’s separated to serve as a filter.
“So how come a Carmen uses an expression like marron’?” he asks her. He’s assumed all along she was Hispanic.
“Oh, don’t be fooled by the Carmen,” she smiles. “My father was a music lover, and he named me after his favorite opera character. How about the last name Pacelli? Is that Italian enough for you?”
“I think so.”
“Or the middle name Ormento?”
“Pretty Italian,” he agrees.
“Rumor has it that my grandfather John Ormento was a big shot in the Mafia. I’ve got an older brother who’s trying to live up to the name, thinks he’s in some kind of gangster-in-training program. Hangs out on Pleasant Avenue, bets numbers, sells drugs - a real success story.”
Goodman pretends he didn’t hear what she just said about having a brother who sells drugs, and he makes a promise to himself never to bring up the subject. For the last day or two, he’s all but forgotten about the black duffel bag lying downstairs in his storage locker, but his financial picture certainly hasn’t improved any, and his debts are approaching critical mass. Still, he knows the last thing in the world he needs is to involve Carmen in that business of his.
The coffee is surprisingly good, and they sip it sitting on the sofa, along with rich fruit tarts that Carmen produces from a bakery box she’d hidden
in the corner. Pop-Tart, already stuffed with veal stew, collapses between them.
“So,” she says, tucking her bare feet underneath her. “Do you still want to hear about my job?”
“Only if you want to tell me,” he says. He’s a pretty quick learner.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s an ‘it’s up to you.’“
“No fair,” she says. “I decided on rice versus noodles.”
“Oh, that world issue,” he says. “Sure, I want to hear about your job.”
She hesitates for a moment, as though she’s trying to come up with the best way to describe exactly what it is she does. Then she says, “I’m a working girl.”
“I know that,” he says. “I thought you were going to be just a wee bit more specific.”
She laughs again, that full-bodied, all-featured laugh of hers that he’s come to like so much. “That’s actually pretty specific,” she says. “I’m a call girl.”
Goodman can only stare at her, dumbstruck.
“A hooker?” she tries. “A prostitute?”
He lifts a hand to stop her. “I get it,” he says.
“Sorry.”
Neither of them says anything. The only sound comes from Pop-Tart’s purring each time Carmen strokes the length of his back. Goodman finds himself overcome with an enormous blanket of sadness and hurt for this young woman who sits beside him.
“So that’s what you did this afternoon?” he finally asks.
“No,” she says, staring off into some world he’s not a part of. “What I did this afternoon was I collected the last of some money I had coming to me.”
He has no response, no questions. Just the sadness and the hurt.
“Is this a story you want to hear?” she asks.
Again he says nothing, afraid that the very sound of his voice will betray the depth of his reaction to all of this. But then she turns toward him without warning and - before he’s had a chance to turn away - sees the look of anguish on his face and the tears welled up in his eyes. In what seems like a single motion, she moves the kitten to the other side of her, closes the distance between the two of them, and takes him in her arms. That gesture - that she should at this moment be somehow moved to comfort him - is more than Michael Goodman can bear, and he loses it all: The tears burst forth and stream hotly down his cheeks, and he sobs uncontrollably - for Carmen, for his daughter, for his dead wife, for himself, for all the terrible sadness in the universe.
Shortly after ten o’clock that night, a van pulls up in front of a building on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. The driver, a thin black man they call Fox, gets out, walks around to the passenger side, and slides open the door. One by one, six black women file out of the van. Fox leads them inside the building to an elevator, where they’re met by another black man. Fox returns to the van and drives off, his job over. For his hour’s worth of work and the use of his van, he’ll be paid $1,000.
The black man and the six black women ride the self-service elevator to the eighth floor. There, the man leads them to the door of an apartment. He knocks once, then three times, then once again. The sounds of locks opening can be heard; then the door swings open. A tall black man holding a double-barreled shotgun, sawed off at both ends so it can be concealed inside the sleeve of a jacket, ushers the women inside. The man who brought them upstairs leaves. For his hour’s worth of work, he’ll be paid $750.
Inside, the apartment resembles any other apartment in the Bronx. The living room is pleasantly, if inexpensively, furnished. The curtains and blinds are drawn shut. The kitchen has formica counters and a vinyl tile floor. A sound system plays an old Smokey Robinson tape.
But the women are not here to lounge in the living room or work in the kitchen. The man with the shotgun leads them to the master bedroom. A few of them have been here before and know the way. There, yet another black man waits for them.
The master bedroom is actually not a bedroom at all. It is large room - nearly as large as the living room. It has no windows: The only window disappeared when the far wall was covered with imitation wood paneling. The only furniture in the room is a table - the type of table one would expect to find in a dining room, except that instead of being covered with a tablecloth, it is topped with a single piece of butcher paper - and six straight-backed chairs are arranged around it. There is an overhead light. Two electric heaters supplement the building’s heating supply.
Without invitation, the women begin to remove their clothing. They remove all of it, until they are absolutely naked. There is nothing suggestive or sexy about the way they do this. Each woman in turn hands her pile of clothes to the black man who was in the room when they got there; he takes each pile out to the living room and places them neatly on the floor.
If the man with the shotgun is aroused by the sight of so much naked flesh around him, he shows no sign of it. Instead, as the women take their places in the chairs around the table, he opens a suitcase and begins removing objects from it and placing them on the table. These objects include three high-quality postal scales; a number of kitchen strainers, spoons, and knives; several rubber stamps and ink pads; half a dozen rolls of Scotch tape; a large box of rubber bands; six dust masks of the type commonly worn by painters or contractors; two large jars of powdered lactose, which is known on the street as milk sugar; and five large boxes full of small glassine envelopes. Then, from his jacket pocket, the man produces one more object, a blue plastic bag roughly the size and shape of a small brick. This he tosses onto the very center of the table. Taking a knife from another pocket, he snaps open the blade with the push of a button. With no less flair than a matador’s aiming for the vulnerable nape of a bull’s neck, he brings the knife down swiftly, almost invisibly, piercing the bag dead center. A puff of white smoke appears, and when he withdraws the knife, the blade is coated white. Then he carefully cuts away the plastic wrapping until nothing remains but a pile of white powder.
While the man completes the performance of that ritual, the women have been putting on the dust masks, covering their mouths and noses. This they do in order to inhale as little of the powder as possible, so as to avoid becoming sleepy or sick, or even overdosing, so potent is the powder they’ll be working with. They’ve been required to remove their clothing so that they won’t be tempted to try to steal, so precious is the powder. Their job is to mix the pile of pure heroin and six equal parts of milk sugar into a uniform consistency; to place single-dosage amounts of the mixture into the glassine envelopes, each of which they will have stamped with a brand name or other identifying logo; to fold and tape shut each glassine they’ve filled; and to count, stack, and rubber-band together bundles containing twenty-five envelopes each. For their evening’s work, which will take about three hours, each of them will be paid $500. The man with the shotgun, who goes by the name Hammer, will receive $2,500; the one who took their clothes, $1,000.
This operation is called a “mill.” It is one of Big Red’s mills. Three hours from now, as the result of this evening’s work, Big Red will have about 1,200 more bundles, or 30,000 more bags of heroin, to sell on the street for $5 apiece. Even after he’s finished paying off Hammer and the six mill workers and his three other helpers, paying the rent for the apartment, and covering certain other expenses, Big Red will be looking at nearly $140,000 worth of profit from the kilogram of heroin he and Hammer took from Michael Goodman.
“I left home when I was sixteen,” Carmen tells Goodman. “Not that there was much to leave, really: an out-of-work father who got drunk every other night and took turns beating his wife and his kids. I took a bus to New York. I had a little money saved up; I used it to put down two months’ rent on an apartment on the Lower East Side. Landlord told me I was pretty enough to find work modeling.”
“You are,” Goodman says.
“I thought so, too,” she laughs. “So I started going to agencies. You want to see pretty? Every one of them’s blond, five ten, 102 pounds, and nothing but lips and che
ekbones. I felt like somebody’s ugly kid sister. So much for the modeling career.
“So I got a job waiting tables, like everybody else who calls herself an actress or a model or whatever. Five bucks an hour, plus tips if you’re willing to smile and flirt enough. Ever try paying rent in this town on five bucks an hour?”
Goodman regards it as a rhetorical question. He could say that he’s having his own troubles at twenty-five an hour, but thinks better of it.
“Then I go to a party in midtown with one of the other waitresses, and I meet this guy, Paulie Mancuso. Real good-looking, nice clothes, wonderful way of looking into a girl’s eyes while he’s talking to her. By now, I know he does it with every girl he meets. But at the time, I was the girl whose eyes he happened to be looking into, and I was stupid enough to think it was about me.
“I gave up my apartment and moved in with Paulie a week later. Didn’t know where he was from or what he did. All I knew about him was that he was making phone calls all the time and going out in the middle of the night.
“Then one day he tells me he’s in terrible trouble, that he owes a bunch of money to some bad people who want to break his knees and stuff. If I love him, I’ll help him out, he says. I love him. ‘What do I have to do?’ I ask him.
“‘You have to spend an hour with this guy,’ he tells me. ‘He won’t hurt you or anything. Just do as he says, and he’ll give you $500.’
“I tell him no way! I cry for two days. I threaten to leave, though of course I’ve got no place to go. The next night, he comes home with his face cut. Tells me they caught him, but he managed to get away. He told me they were going to kill him next time, and I believed him. So I said okay.
“I went to this guy’s hotel room. He had me take off all my clothes and bend over a big pile of pillows in the middle of his living room floor, facedown, while he stood behind me rubbing himself. I kept waiting for the pain. But he never touched me. He did his thing, zipped up, and handed me five $100 bills.
“It seemed like a joke: all that money just for letting some weirdo get his rocks off. So I did it again the next night, only the second guy was a little more hands-on. After that, there were other hotel rooms, other guys. Before I knew it, I was nothing but a high-priced whore. Paulie took every cent I brought in. Me, I was glad to give it to him. I thought I was saving his life, and I sure didn’t want to keep the money.
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