“I’m out, Mr. Vartan,” I said. “All the way out.”
The fit septuagenarian allowed another hint of mirth to flit across his lips.
No one gets out, his smile said, unless it’s on his back.
I first met Harris Vartan when I was twelve and he was called Ben Tilly. He and my father worked together as labor organizers, but Ben and my old man went on different paths.
“I’m only asking that you do what you do, Leonid,” he said. “After all, a man is defined by his labor.”
A cell phone sitting on the table started vibrating. Vartan paid it no attention.
“A man is also defined,” I said, “by those who work for him—and those whom he works for.”
“Sometimes it’s not so clear who is working for whom.”
“That may be,” I speculated, “except when the individual in question is self-employed.”
“No man is an island,” Vartan lamented, “no king not a man.”
At that point Lucas and Pittman appeared at the open glass doors of the coffee shop. Vartan raised a solitary finger, stopping them in their tracks.
“Do your job, Leonid,” Vartan said as he stood up from the table. “That’s all anyone expects.”
A waiter came up to him, saying, “Did you want your check, sir?”
“My friend is paying.”
Vartan departed with Tony’s dogs at his heels.
While taking out my wallet I wondered what it was my father’s old friend was telling me. Every nuance, including appearing there with Tony’s men, meant that whatever I did, it had to be just right.
Or not.
28
I once had a partner. His name was Bill. Bill was an okay guy and we were, at least from a technical standpoint, an ideal team in a shady kind of way. He was white—a tall, sandy-haired, handsome guy with a couple of years of college, which made him at least literate and able to deal with the concept of two plus two. I was a tree stump of a black man, home-schooled by a dyed-in-the-wool Communist revolutionary, with more books and ideas shoved into my mind than the librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian.
We, Bill and I, did things that would not have made us look good in front of a judge and jury but we were slicker than graphite on a block of ice, so the courts might as well have been in heaven while our feet were mired in New York clay.
I trusted Bill.
He trusted me.
I suspected that he’d slept with my wife a time or two, but Katrina and I slept around so much that the word “betrayal,” in our private lexicon, had synonyms like “naughty” and “sly.”
Bill and I didn’t have an office. We’d meet in coffee shops and stand-up pizza joints, planning how to take down innocents on behalf of our bent clientele. That was half of our business. The other half entailed the secret resolution of internal disputes.
One time we were hired by Four-fingers John Marr to pass a document to the police that would incriminate his rival, Hard Joe Tyner. It was a delicate procedure that took half a day of planning. We did it while strolling through the Museum of Modern Art. Pretending to study the paintings of Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, we hammered out a plan that would hit all the points of the service we provided.
Hard Joe had made one mistake in his otherwise spotless criminal career. He was extorting the president of an insurance company and accepting the money personally through a complex series of money transfers. Marr had gotten a list of the account numbers used. That’s all the cops would need. Once they identified the victim, all they had to do was offer him immunity and Tyner would fall, hard.
But Marr didn’t want his associates to suspect him and so he came to us—me and Bill.
“I don’t see why we can’t just put the shit in an envelope and send it to the detective in charge of investigating organized crime,” Bill said after we gave the guard our tickets.
“Tyner’s people would suspect Marr,” I said patiently. “He’s the one with the most to gain.”
“So?”
“It’s not professional, and anyway a good lawyer might be able to get evidence obtained in that fashion thrown out on some obscure technicality. Also, the police would get suspicious. Or worse, they might get stupid and ignore it.”
“We could turn it in ourselves,” Bill offered then. “Just walk into One Police Plaza and say, ‘Hey, look what we found.’ ”
“And we’d be their bitches from then on. Anytime we said no they’d threaten to turn us out.”
Our talks always started out like that. Bill had a good mind but he was lazy. He didn’t see our job as a craft, more like a pickup pool hustle, where there was always a chance that you could lose. Luckily he deferred to me when it came to finalizing a plan, so we went on with our museum excursion.
After getting our fill of culture we settled into the restaurant bar for espressos and biscotti. I brought up a friend of Bill’s who worked for Tyner. The man’s name was Sharp. Sharp was in debt to a bookie who wasn’t afraid of Tyner. Tyner didn’t like his people gambling and would have come down hard on Sharp if he heard about it. Sharp was also well acquainted with Tyner’s accountant, a man named Norman Bly. Bly had a girlfriend, Mae Lynn, who managed to look like Jayne Mansfield while not being much older than Shirley Temple—when Temple was singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”
The plan followed nature, which was always the best way to go. Why blast a path down a mountain when erosion has already excavated the best route?
First we would take some incriminating pictures of Bly and Mae Lynn, then we would go to Sharp and offer him the cash he needed to call off the leg-breakers; all he’d have to do was put a few papers in Bly’s briefcase on a certain day. We’d pretend that the papers were only there to incriminate Bly.
Now it made sense to go to the organized crime unit. We’d have a delivery service hand over the pictures and Mae Lynn’s father’s address. That very afternoon Bly and Lynn were going to meet in a midtown hotel managed by Tyner’s real estate company. We didn’t have to worry about the cops ignoring our delivery. They’d be happy to pass around pictures of a mature fourteen-year-old and old fat Norman.
It worked beautifully. The cops busted the couple in the nude. They confiscated the briefcase and found the numbers connecting Tyner to the extortion scheme. They offered Bly a deal that he couldn’t refuse and Tyner went to prison.
It all went exactly as planned . . . but there was a problem.
Bill let his college certificate get him in trouble. Since he was better educated than all of his hoodlum friends, he thought he was smarter—than anyone. So he figured if we were getting fifteen thousand out of Marr, then Tyner would pay double. He went to a guy named KC Longerman to pass the plan (without our names attached to it) along to Tyner. But somewhere in Bill’s education he skipped the course that would’ve told him I was the one who introduced him to KC.
I went to Bill’s place, with murder in mind, the night after we put the plan in motion. Norman Bly was in police custody and Joe Tyner was soon to be a guest of the state. As far as I was concerned, this was also Bill’s last night of life.
His plan wouldn’t have worked. Tyner could have easily found out who Four-fingers had contracted with. But Bill thought he was too slick. He didn’t mean to get us killed.
I was so angry that murder was only a twitch away. But as I stood over him I realized that Bill’s betrayal was my fault. Men like Bill and me should never have been partners, not in the long-term straight-world way of contracts and agreements. We weren’t businessmen. We were independent agents out for ourselves by necessity, and by nature. Bill didn’t see any problem with getting a little on the side. As long as I didn’t know and wasn’t hurt, what did I have to complain about?
I left his apartment door ajar, with a hollow-point .45-caliber bullet standing like a soldier on his breakfast table.
We haven’t crossed paths since.
I REMEMBERED BILL because even though I have eschewed partnership since that time, I am still,
as Harris Vartan noted, not completely self-sufficient. With the police knocking on my door, dead men in my wake, and killers studying my name, I knew that I had to get my butt in gear and head way downtown, where the laws of nature and the laws of man intersect, intertwine, and make up a whole new system of justice.
29
In spite of my sporadic fantasies about foreign climes, the only city I could live in is New York. Most other American municipalities are segregated by class and culture, education and personal choice. But in New York everybody is jumbled up together and bounced around until you have African princes walking side by side with Appalachian Daughters of the American Revolution, and aspiring starlets making room for hopeful housewives past their prime. Even with real estate costs climbing above the reach of almost everyone, you can still find all the elements of humanity riding the number 1 train down under the West Side of Manhattan.
There were at least a dozen readers in the car I rode on the trek toward Wall Street. They perused novels and textbooks, newspapers and hip-hop magazines. There were displaced housewives going to work because one income didn’t pay the rent anymore. Many of these watched their soaps on tiny screens plugged into earphones. That afternoon I saw books by Thomas Mann, Joy King, Edwidge Danticat, and Danielle Steel being read. One dusty fellow kept turning his head suspiciously, looking for enemies that might be sneaking up on him. A chubby white woman smiled at me and even pursed her lips. At one point a troupe of doo-wop singers composed of one Asian and three blacks made their way through our car, crooning “On Broadway” and “Up on the Roof.”
There were two middle-aged women sitting across from me, one black and the other white. They were laughing and chatting happily about work. It seemed that a supervisor who had been leaning on them had an affair with a secretary who was also fooling around with the big boss.
“Honey, when he came out of Metcalf’s office he was white as marshmallows,” the black woman was saying.
She was having such a good time that she didn’t notice the little guy in the unremarkable clothes sitting next to her on the bench. He wore tan trousers and a navy shirt. His once completely yellow head of hair now was layered with differing shades of dirty gray. His back was almost fully turned to the black woman but somehow Regular Joe’s elbow had jostled her big blue purse so that it fell partly open.
The next step would have been for him to get up when the train came close to a stop. That way, when the brakes were applied, he could pretend to fall off balance and make a fast grab. People in his profession had good hand-eye coordination and great dexterity.
Maybe fifteen seconds before the process was to begin I coughed. In the pickpocket’s ear I might as well have yelled, “Stop thief!”
He looked up at me and I shook my head ever so slightly.
He smiled and nodded, got to his feet, and moved on down the line.
“Ma’am,” I called across the aisle.
“What?” the chatty black woman said in a markedly unfriendly tone.
“Your bag is open.”
Her reaction was completely predictable. First she grabbed her purse and searched it. A red wallet floated near the top. But there was also her cell phone and MP3 player to check out. She cinched the bag shut and glared at me for a second and a half, wondering if somehow I had tricked her. The defiant stare then melted into contrition and she finally, reluctantly, said, “Thank you,” as if I were a mischievous child who just pointed out that her underwear was showing.
THE ARCHITECTURAL EQUIVALENT of the nondescript pickpocket was a gray-walled building a few blocks north of where the World Trade Center used to stand. There were no guards or doormen in the lobby, and the man I was looking for didn’t have his name or title on the sparse directory.
By way of the stairs I entered into a dull green corridor on the seventh floor and turned right, following the slender hallway past five doors to offices that were permanently locked. It was only the unremarkable sixth door that had any life behind it.
I knocked and waited. A minute went by but I didn’t knock again. Another minute passed and I waited patiently. A few seconds later there came a loud click. The portal eased open on its own and I walked in.
THE ANTECHAMBER TO the Important Man’s office was as bare as an office can get while still serving a function. There was a maroon metal desk with a no-frills swivel chair behind it and another folding chair set up in the corner. There were no paintings on the light-green walls, no carpeting on the unstained but sealed pine floor. There weren’t even any light fixtures, just two high-wattage stand-up lamps set in opposite corners.
Behind the desk was seated, as erect as a high school teacher in a Norman Rockwell painting, an effeminate, forty-something black man wearing gold-rim glasses and no smile. His burgundy necktie was thin enough to qualify as string and the black suit was tight fitting with stingy lapels.
This man was Christian Latour.
As I have said before, this was the year 2008, and race, though still a major player in American culture, had undergone a serious transmogrification. A black man was running for president. There was a legally blind black man in the governor’s seat in Albany. White American children and adults had heroes from Snoop Dogg to Tiger Woods. This wasn’t the age of being pushed to the back of the bus or excluded from the awareness of the media.
Seeing this arrogant and thin Cerberus before me, I remembered my father once telling me, “There is no greater slave name than Christian. Bill and Robert and Joseph and Dorothy are all equally qualified slave names. Any name that reflects the conqueror is a nod to his superiority. But to take his religion as your appellation is like falling down on your knees before him.”
My father had never met Christian Latour. This man was the epitome of defiance. He hadn’t so much taken on the name but rather he took it away from the people who once owned it. He sat like a Catholic cardinal in that simple throne, and you would never call him subservient or a victim.
“Mr. McGill,” he said, neither in greeting nor as a question. It was just a comment.
“Mr. Latour,” I responded.
“You don’t have an appointment.”
“I didn’t have the leisure to make one.”
I liked Christian. He was so righteous in his monklike cell. He had one of the most important jobs in the Western Hemisphere and even though no one knew it he was in no way nonplussed by this anonymity. He was satisfied in his own skin, and that was a rare feat for any American.
Even though I liked him, Mr. Latour did not approve of me. I was coarse and gruff, listening to barrelhouse blues while he dreamed in operatic splendor.
There was a black box on Christian’s metal desk. There was a small aperture in the top through which light of any of the primary and secondary hues of the color wheel could shine. The hole shone a brilliant blue. Christian glanced at it and let his lip curl slightly.
“Mr. Rinaldo will see you now.”
30
Where Christian’s cubicle was barren and undersized, his boss’s grand hall of an office was a study in opulence. Thick burgundy carpets ran between royal-blue walls upon which hung Renaissance masterpieces lit from the ceiling by spotlights, artwork on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which has a policy of not lending out its possessions).
Ten steps into the room I passed a fully stocked mahogany bar built into the wall on the right. Across the way, on the left, was an altar carved from a solid block of apple-green-and-white jadeite. This sacred stand was tall as a man and twice as wide. Images of faces and animal forms, gracefully understated, flowed across the priceless sculpture.
There was no window, no portal to the outside world, but a green, red, and blue songbird with long, drooping feathers sang out gloriously as I passed. It was a greeting, or possibly a warning, but regardless the tune subsided before I had taken the final twenty-three steps to Alphonse Rinaldo’s desk.
He was standing behind a dining-table-sized piece of furniture made from a single plank of u
nfamiliar dark wood. He always stood when I entered the room. Maybe he did that with everyone—I don’t know.
Alphonse was of medium height (that is to say an inch or three taller than I), with flawless medium-white skin, black hair, and hard dark eyes. To the casual observer he might have seemed to be of a mild temper, but many of the worst monsters I’ve known were like that: pleasant even in the regrettable act of murder.
His hair, which was neither long nor short, was perfectly coiffed, and his suit would have turned Giorgio Armani’s head.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.” If quicksilver could talk it would sound like him.
The chair I preferred, Alphonse had once told me, was pre-Columbian, carved from a single piece of volcanic rock.
“It was used for sacrifices,” he’d said on that day a few years earlier. “There was a tray that led down from the seat to carry the blood to the vessel.”
I suppose I must have looked a little uncomfortable, because he added, “Don’t worry, Mr. McGill, it was used exclusively on virgins.”
I had once asked Rinaldo if he answered directly to the mayor.
“I am the special assistant to the City of New York,” he answered as if there were a grim god that lived under the stone and steel, concrete and grime, of the city, a god whose will carried more weight than any politician or generation of voters.
And if Manhattan was an ancient deity set to oversee our island and its neighbors, then Alphonse Rinaldo was an errant angel thrown down among swine. He could buy your soul from a third party and send it twirling like a glass top on the granite stairs of justice. He was without peer, the most dangerous man in New York City. And he almost always knew more than anyone else in the room.
I HAD DONE the special assistant a favor some years before. There was a certain gentleman named Todd who had so much money that he owned a sprawling single-story home set atop a midtown skyscraper and encased in one-way glass. He could see out but the world could not see in.
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