Yakoob was back up at the table, and the hunger in his eyes returned. On cue, classic Rakim rapped overhead against Eric B’s shuffling beat, “Thinking of a master plan/Cuz ain’t nuthin but sweat inside my hand…”
“This is a Fidelity Investments joint,” Koob declared. “I nominate a dude named Cavanaugh.” He proceeded to take out a very certain rage on the break. The shots ricocheted so violently it made the others twitch. Again, the reasons were not detailed. Koob was simply blowing his nominee away in rapid succession, one ball at a time. He would mutter reasons in passing—“by-appointment-only for new accounts, but no fuckin’ sign sayin’ so.” The crew learned only that their friend was humiliated while trying to give an investment house his money. Yet Koob’s own good shooting form was feeling good to him. His bad mood could be tempered by a private satisfaction he found in the precision with which each shot was executed. It took him nine shots to drop fifteen balls.
“Todd Dukovny,” he declared next.
“Who’s that?” Griff asked.
“Fidelity customer,” Koob answered without looking up.
For the next twelve or thirteen balls, Sidarra began to wonder if playing mad was a good investment strategy.
“Somebody Yamaguchi,” Yakoob said as he stood before yet another break. “I’ll get the rest of his name once I’m in.” He broke powerfully and lined up to start shooting.
“Who’s that?” Griff asked again.
“’Nother customer there. ’Nother motherfucker made me wait.”
Griff shook his head slightly. “How many motherfuckers were ahead of you, baby?”
Koob looked up finally. The whites of his eyes held a bitter redness, and his gaze was cold. “These aren’t the people that was ahead of me. These are the motherfuckers who made me wait.”
Griff and Sidarra sat back and watched Koob dispatch Mr. Yamaguchi. They worried the same thing as the next game went on to Andrea Roisman. It seemed too personal, so personal they didn’t quite know what to say about it. Whiteboy had rarely been used to handle very personal scores. When Koob dropped the last ball on his nominee, Ms. Roisman, he looked up.
“I’ll have to get the receptionist’s name when I go back there.”
“Why would you go back there?” Sidarra asked.
“To get her name.”
“Maybe Raul should get her name for you,” Griff suggested. “Sidarra’s right. People remember angry people, and these people pissed you off.” Yakoob seemed to think about it. “I mean, from the sound of it,” Griff continued, “you’re really planning a fucking bank heist.”
“Nah,” Koob answered, his tone still strangely flat and lifeless, “not really. Cavanaugh’s the bank. He’s gonna rob his own people, and we’re gonna walk off with their shit. The bank’s gonna insure it, then these people are gonna fuck him up; he gonna lose his job and Fidelity Bank is gonna start losing customers. At least new ones. I just gotta get in.”
Sidarra squinted her eyes, cocked her neck back, and said, “Whoa! That’s like biblical-caliber vengeance, baby. Can you do that?”
Yakoob said nothing, but kept shooting at idle balls. “Sid, that’s basically what I been doin’, right? Robbin’ banks. This is just a little better. The banker robs the bank.”
The comment slightly lifted Griff’s funk. “But you gotta become the banker, right?” he asked. “He’s not just gonna start jacking customers out of midlife greed.”
“Sho nuff. So I gotta get in,” Koob agreed, “the right way.”
“Koob, try, baby,” Griff said delicately, “try not to let style rule you on this one, okay? I mean, your shit is on fire. You shot a fuckin’ masterpiece in here tonight. The man really needs a straight ass-kickin’.”
“What are you tryin’ to say?” Koob asked, turning to face Griff.
“I think he’s asking why you don’t just rob the bank the way you’ve been doing it, Koob?” Sidarra shot. “Why get fancy now? Keep it simple.”
“Just ’cause you can paint a masterpiece doesn’t mean you should. That’s all I’m saying,” Griff added. “There’s a certain elegance to stick figures sometimes, ya dig?”
Yakoob chalked his cue excessively. Griff had no real idea how he felt. “A’ight,” Koob conceded. “I won’t expose myself. I’m gonna try to go in as this bitch motherfuckin’ Cavanaugh if I can, but I won’t expose myself. I’ll figure these ofays out. Don’t trip.”
The itch that had started to burn down Sidarra’s lower back cooled somewhat.
These were more moods than Raul could handle right away, and he looked confused as he stood with a fresh tray of drinks beholding the sudden peace. He sat them down and watched the billiard balls zip back and forth. Then Raul raised his voice above the music.
“Yo, I got a question.” All eyes turned on him as if the sofa had suddenly spoken up. “What is it? Y’all hate white folks up in here? Is that what this is about?” It was his eureka moment.
The three looked at each other, all of them wondering who let Raul stay in the room too long. “What kind of question is that?” Sidarra asked him.
“Nah, brother,” Griff said without looking up. The song “Purple Haze” came on overhead. “We teach tolerance in here.”
But Koob wouldn’t have it. He stepped into the darkness and right into Raul’s face. “The fuck is the matter with you?” he whispered angrily. “What? Who are you now, motherfucker? Ted Koppel?” His eyes squinted sharply and he looked like he was about to slap the assassin. “You supposed to be in Attica, right? You couldn’t hate a honky in Attica if you wanted to up there. Now please let me handle my business, and you handle yours, all right?” Jimi Hendrix’s music, feedback over lyrics, wailed in the background. “Griff,” Yakoob said, turning deadpan to him, “what is that shit?”
Matter-of-factly, yet a little unsure he wanted to say it in front of Raul, Griff stated, “It’s a rare song about the approach of a male orgasm.”
Koob’s expression didn’t change. “How ’bout you give us a fucking break on the acid trip?”
Griff nodded and headed out of the curtains to change the CD. Sidarra stepped toward the chastened hard-on sitting in the darkness.
“Look, baby,” she told him gently but firmly, “nobody’s hating in here. We’re just borrowing from those who took from us, and that’s really about it. You doin’ a good job, Raul. Just stay good, my love. And stay quiet, okay? We got you.”
Raul straightened up like she had just sung “Happy Birthday” to him. “It’s all you, Miss Sidarra,” he said with pride.
But Yakoob thought Raul was better off gone and had sent him out the back door by the time Griff returned to the lounge.
“Um,” Sidarra began, “I have a question.” The occasion of Raul’s early departure was her cue to raise a concern that had first started to bother her around the time Griff finally told her about Koob’s sick bet on Eagleton’s death. “How are we paying the roughneck?”
Yakoob and Griff immediately looked at each other. “Salary—” Griff said.
“Small percentage commission,” said Yakoob at almost the same time.
“What?” she asked. “Which one?”
“I meant that he always gets something to live on,” Griff explained, but it wasn’t smooth. “Sometimes we treat him as an expense. Sometimes he just gets a dividend.”
“That’s some tricky shit,” she said, leaning her cue against the wall and turning to face them.
“What I meant was he’s got to get something on each take,” Koob tried to say, his old demeanor returning. “He gotta get a salary ’cause he’s still doin’ a lot of everyday shit like little jobs, investigating shit, getting descriptions—”
“Of what?” she asked, hands on her hips.
Koob tried a glance at Griff, but Griff knew better than to look back at him. “You know, places,” Koob answered. “Whether a company exists. Whether a guy got what his account statement says he got. You know, motherfuckers say one thing on paper and got a wh
ole ’nother thing for real.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Sid, if he do a real peep, like he just got through doing for us with the Solutions account thing you wanted, he should get a small cut,” Koob said a little more convincingly. “A percentage. Don’t you think?”
“You were gonna tell me about that, right?” Sidarra asked, hands still fastened to her her hips. “I mean, just what the hell is that?”
“Be cool, Sid. You just asked how the nigga gets paid,” Koob assured her.
“Does he know he’ll get a cut?”
Koob again looked at Griff and would not answer until Griff finally looked back at him. There was no hiding the conversations behind her back now.
“Yeah. We told him,” Griff answered.
“‘We,’” she declared. “‘We’ told him? I never told him a damn thing.”
“That’s on me,” Griff said. He was abusing his authority with her, and they both knew it. That’s the thing about attraction. It sits in the background of conversations that should take place and allows them not to happen. “I was supposed to ask you at your party Sunday, but I, uh, obviously didn’t get the chance.”
Then the new and improving Sidarra, directed by attraction, did a strange thing with the revelation of being left out: she let it go. Sidarra found herself changing the subject and talked on and on about her job at the Board of Miseducation. She updated them on every last part of the new chancellor search, candidates from big-city school districts around the country turning New York down, and how her favorite was the long shot, a black woman named Dr. Grace Blackwell from Gary, Indiana. Sidarra went on about the old chancellor. His widow was in the news. Had they seen it? Just shakes of the head. Attraction seemed to want the evening to end on a pleasant note.
19
EVEN IF SIDARRA SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BEFOREHAND, there was no mistaking it once Michael received her two gift-wrapped peace offerings: Michael was a person who’d gone giftless for many years. She handed him the boxes and his eyes lit up with pure joy behind his glasses. The skin on his neck inched back suddenly, and he couldn’t stop smiling. Michael didn’t know he was being bought, yet he was happily sold. In one box was a Cartier watch with the smallest diamond on the tip of each hand. It was hardly the top of their line, but it was more watch than Michael had ever owned. In the other box was a pair of matching cuff links. The set was a closeout package, but Michael could have cared less. “I think I forgot one of your birthdays along the way,” she told him.
Michael stammered in speechlessness and kept staring in disbelief at the gifts. “I don’t know what to say, darling. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“You like?”
“I love ’em.”
Michael loved them so much that he wore them all the time. For a man who didn’t own a shirt with proper cuffs, this was no small feat. He found a way to attach the cuff links to regular shirtsleeves. For a token booth vendor in New York City, he was the lone guy in a system of hundreds who wore cuff links to work. People noticed too, usually women his age and older. They would watch him counting their money and dishing their tokens and occasionally say into the thick bulletproof glass, “Nice cuff links.” Unfortunately, he often couldn’t hear them. The millennium was near, but New York City had not yet figured out how to make exchanges between subway riders and token booth vendors audible through the partition. The vendors had a microphone they could use when it suited them, but customers would have to yell things. So they did. “Nice cuffs!” Then, all the way down the platform and sometimes over the roar of arriving trains, you could hear Michael’s proud voice boom over the loudspeaker: “Thank you, my dear. Thank you very much.”
Of course, it wasn’t Michael’s birthday. It was more like Sidarra’s guilt about a relationship that was paralyzed by her infatuation with a married man and Michael’s inability to do anything to change that. It was also a calculated setup to get a ride out to the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey, because Michael had a car and no place else to be on a Saturday. They had never gone there before, but Sidarra had heard from enough people that it was Jersey’s version of Fifth Avenue. Raquel rode along too. After weeks of constant pestering, Raquel had won out in her quest to have her mother see more of Michael. They all had a date with McDonald’s, she said, and other things to go over. Unfortunately, Sidarra and Michael had very little to say to each other. So on the drive across the George Washington Bridge and down the turnpike, they did what people do who are at a loss for words and scenery. They talked about other people and passing cars.
“That man looks like my brother Alex,” Sidarra said, pointing into a white sedan. “I heard from Alex the other day,” Sidarra said.
“Oh yeah? How’s he doin’?”
“Fine. He’s very happy about the schools his kids attend. Says they’re really good out there. You know his girls are nine, eleven, and fourteen.”
“No, I didn’t know that. This is the brother in New Mexico?”
“One of them. He and Charles both live there. Charles doesn’t have kids. He’s not married. Charles and I don’t really speak. Alex and I don’t talk very often either.”
Silence ate up the turnpike again. “That’s family for you,” Michael finally added. “You don’t get to pick ’em.”
“True enough.” She stared at the lanes of cars ahead of them. “But we had a nice talk. It was good to catch up a bit.”
“I bet.”
Suddenly Sidarra saw a sleek gold car with a wide chrome grille come up beside them on the passenger side. “What is that, Michael? I think that’s the one. What kind of car is that?”
Michael glanced over and immediately laughed. “That’s a Mercedes, baby. Want me to get you one?”
Sidarra couldn’t take her eyes off it. Raquel pressed her face against the back window to see it better. “Yes, I do. That’s the one Alex was telling me about. He said it’s a good car.”
Michael’s face scrunched up a bit. “No question about that. What? You need a car now?”
“I was thinking about it.”
“Great!” Raquel squealed from behind them. “Let’s get a car, Mommy! That’s a great idea.”
“Grandpa always wanted a Mercedes, Raquel. That was my daddy’s favorite.”
“Not this again,” Michael sighed. “Where you gonna park a Mercedes where you live? On the street? Ha!”
“Wherever my father would have parked it,” she shot back.
“You know how much that car costs? You can’t even drive, can you, Sidarra?”
She was barely listening, fascinated as she was by the lines and the slope of the windows. She imagined a debonair Roxbury Parish behind the wheel on his way to the rich people’s mall with his wife and daughter and granddaughter beside him. “What are those little things on the headlights?”
Michael begrudgingly craned his neck to the side so he could see out the passenger side. “Tiny windshield wipers, Sidarra.” He added a short breath between each word for emphasis, then repeated it. “Windshield wipers. On the goddamned headlights. Wonder what the rest of us will do without a set of those.”
Sidarra remained transfixed by the car. “I would want mine in blue,” she said.
“Light blue,” Raquel chirped.
Michael shook his head, hit the accelerator, and sped away.
SIDARRA AND RAQUEL SHARED A MOTHER-DAUGHTER FACT neither one said aloud: they were not in New York anymore. This place was different. Michael had his own fact to keep quiet: he was getting as lost as could be. Apparently the State of New Jersey wished to keep the exact location of the Short Hills Mall a secret. The signs on the highway—those that existed at all—came up in a bunch and informed him that an exit he needed or a “route” he should take was about ten feet ahead. He missed several. He was always in the wrong lane when the roadway forked or the exit-only lane appeared on the left instead of the right. As Michael cursed the state, its governor, and every other driver on the road, Sidarra and Raquel quietly took in the ho
uses and scenery of another land.
When they finally parked in a lot at the mall, they immediately discovered that the people in this world also celebrated Christmas. But it felt to Sidarra and her daughter like a different Christmas—not their Christmas—they were visiting. The people of Short Hills spared no holiday expense. The mall glimmered with decorations. All the Christmas trees were perfectly trimmed and lit up two shades above a sparkle. The ceilings were bright, the floors shiny and clean, and holiday music played not from speakers but from live quartets of classical musicians sprinkled at various points across the corridors. Raquel had never seen carolers before. There was Fendi, Neiman Marcus, Gucci, and every other store you could want. You felt so good about being there that you wanted to spend every cent of someone else’s money.
Sidarra made a mental map of the stores she intended to get to. Some she could do with Raquel and Michael, but for others she’d have to find a way to lose them. For that she’d also need to map their stopping points—an arcade, a Santa line, the food court where the McDonald’s was.
“You guys hungry?” she asked. “You’re not supposed to shop on an empty stomach, you know?”
“Why not?” Raquel asked.
Sidarra wasn’t actually sure. She herself often shopped hungry. “I think it’s because hunger makes you stupid and irritable. Suppose you’re in a dressing room trying on some clothes you’re not sure fit right. How are you gonna be able to make the right decision if you can’t think straight and start getting mad at the pair of pants?”
Raquel thought about it for a second. “Is that really true, Mom?”
“For some people it is.”
“I’m sure as hell hungry,” Michael grumbled, still fighting mad about the roads of New Jersey. “And I know straight where we’re going—right, Rock?”
The Importance of Being Dangerous Page 18