Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  “You don’t seem bitter,” she said.

  He shrugged again. “In his own time, God will see to Colonel Qaddafi,” he said. “Meanwhile, you must explain to me how Best Foods is allow such a creature as you to escape them.”

  “Layoffs,” she said. “It’s a union shop. First hired, last fired.”

  Paolo nodded. “Sensible,” he said. “I, too, feel loyalty to the men I have hire. I know that some of them may not be the most ideal of workers, but even they have families to feed.”

  “Very compassionate,” she said.

  Paolo shook his head. “Is a weakness,” he told her. “In Palermo, we are almost all famiglia. Since one cannot fire one’s relative, we are force to coexist. I am in hopes we can forge the same spirit here.”

  Al grimaced. “Good luck with that,” she said.

  Paolo laughed. “Fool’s errand,” he said. “May I ask you one more question? How did you hear of us? We are still so small, I thought no one could know of us.”

  Her head swam. She’d had an answer for this one, but her head was thundering too hard for her to come up with it, so she improvised. “Your forklift shop,” she said. “I have a buddy who works for them, he told me you looked like you could use some help.”

  “Very astute,” Paolo said. “Like I’ma say, we are still very small here. I have no need for foreman, not yet. Maybe soon, if God isa smile on us. But I do have a lilla problem, some crate we have shipped isa get stuck inside the container. Maybe you help us out for today, okay, you get my stuff unload for me, I pay you cash.”

  “I can do that,” she said.

  “Beautiful!” he said. “And you leave you phone number, when we get a lilla more business, I gonna call you right away.”

  “Deal,” she told him.

  The wooden crate inside the metal container was almost as big as the container itself. It was mounted on long wooden sleeper rails, and it was one of those sleepers that had caused all the problems. It had come loose from the bottom of one side of the wooden crate and it was jammed behind the container door frame.

  “Everybody,” Paolo yelled, “everybody, listen to me. I want to introduce—Raffi, you fuckina mongey, shut uppa you hole ana listen to me.” Raffi was the smallest of the three guys that Al had watched wrestle with the crate yesterday, he was also the loudest, and from the look on his face, the angriest. “You hear me?” Paolo demanded.

  Raffi grimaced. “Okay, okay,” he said, impatient.

  “From now on,” Paolo said, addressing them all, “English only. You understand?”

  He was interrupted by a howl of protest from Raffi, but he shouted it down. “English only! No Italian, no Spanish, English. Only. You understand?” He didn’t wait for answers. “You don’t speak English today, okay, tomorrow you are gone from here, I send you home.” Raffi and the larger guy stared sullenly at Paolo. The third, who looked like he hadn’t reached drinking age yet, had a hard time taking his eyes off Alessandra. Or off her body, anyhow. He didn’t seem to be able to make eye contact.

  “Okay, next,” Paolo said. “Raffi, do you listen to me? You hear what I’ma say?” Al noticed that the more agitated Paolo got, the worse his accent became.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, English. I catch,” Raffi said, his face sour.

  “Good. Next, this nice young lady, name is Alicia. She gonna help us out today.” They all looked at her, then back at Paolo, blank looks on their faces. “For today, she gonna be the boss. Foreman. Capataz. El Jefe. You do what she’sa tell you.”

  The protests over language paled in comparison to what now erupted. The two smaller guys yelled simultaneously in some language Al didn’t recognize. She wished, not for the first time, that her Spanish was better. She could sometimes understand a word or two of Italian due to the similarities with Spanish, but she assumed these guys were speaking some regional dialect because she couldn’t decipher a thing.

  “English!” Paolo bellowed, red-faced. “English! What I’ma just tella you? Cocksuckabasta, English! You don do what I’ma say, you go home first thing tomorrow!”

  They stood in shocked silence. The kid continued staring at Al. “No more talk!” Paolo was pissed. “You do what I’ma say, you hear me? English! Only! And Al isa the boss, she gonna tella you stupida cocksuckabasta how you gonna get that thing outa the box ana insidea the building! That’s it!” He turned and stomped away angrily, paused about ten feet away. “English!” he yelled. “You hear me?” He gathered himself, looked at Al. “Raffi,” he said, pointing to the shortest. “Tonio,” he said, pointing to the kid. “And Vincenzo. Vinnie.” Up close, Vinnie was much more intimidating that he had been from a distance. He had the mass and muscle of a pro linebacker.

  They all stood and watched Paolo go inside. Raffi looked at Al and sneered. His face betrayed what he felt, it showed a mixture of contempt and hunger. He hates me already, Al thought. She had run into Raffi’s type before, he was the kind of guy who regarded her as nothing more than a life-support system for what she carried between her legs. Funny how so many guys found it perfectly acceptable to drool over one small part of her and revile the rest.

  Al walked over and looked at the crate. “You guys have a pry bar?” she said, wishing her head didn’t pound quite so hard when she bent over to look at the jammed sleeper.

  Three of them looked at her blankly while Raffi crawled up onto the forklift. “Pry bar,” she said louder, her patience wearing thin. “Crowbar? Pipe? Two-by-four? Raffi, get down from there.”

  He ignored her, ground the forklift’s starter.

  She grabbed him by the collar, dragged him down off the forklift, and pitched him onto the ground. When he tried to get back to his feet, she stuck a booted foot in his ass and shoved. Raffi took two running steps and sprawled face-first in the dirt littering the pavement of the parking lot. Al followed him, seized him by the shirt collar as he scrabbled to his feet, bleeding from his chin. “English!” she yelled in his face. “Only! You get me? Or do I have to explain it to you some more?”

  “Okay!” he yelled back. “Okay! I catch!”

  “Good!” She let him go, he backed away, and again she followed him.

  “Okay!” he yelled again. Raffi was enraged, he couldn’t stand still and he couldn’t hold his ground, he retreated step by step and Al followed. He kept peering over her shoulder looking for support from the other two. Al did not allow herself to look back to gauge their reactions.

  “From now on, you do what I tell you. You catch that, motherfucker?” She stopped, finally, and a step later so did he.

  She turned her back on Raffi and walked back over to the container. The other two stood there in silence. The kid’s face was white, but Vinnie was impossible to read. She was surprised at that, most men, in her opinion, would be laughing and ridiculing Raffi. “We need pipes,” she told them. “As wide as this box, okay, they gotta reach all the way from this sleeper over to the one on the other side.” She turned, Raffi was still standing where she’d left him. “Hey, Einstein,” she yelled, “get your ass over here! You want me to make you go find this shit all by yourself? We’ll all stand here and wait for you, how about that?”

  He approached reluctantly, red-faced, bleeding from a cut on his chin, quivering with embarrassment and rage. “Okay!” he yelled. “Okay!”

  “All right. I want you guys to look through the piles of junk in this place, we need some pipes, they gotta reach all the way across the bottom of this crate. We need at least three of them. Four would be better.” Her headache seemed to be concentrating itself right behind her eyes. “This big around,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. If I gotta bust my hump in this place, she thought, at least I’m gonna have a little fun while I do it. She looked at Raffi. “Twice the size of your dick,” she told him.

  The kid looked like he wanted to laugh but was afraid to. Vincenzo merely turned and walked away. Tough audience, she thought. Well, too bad, I thought it was funny. “What are yo
u waiting for?” she bellowed at Raffi. “A written invitation? Move! Chop-chop! Let’s go!”

  It took more yelling and cursing, but Al and her three new assistants got the crate un-jammed from the container and up on some rollers, and with the use of some long rusty chains they got it started out of its metal prison. Once Raffi and company understood her system, they pitched in, pulling the rollers out as each one of them made its way to the end of the crate, repositioning them back under the leading edge of the crate again, and things progressed at what she thought was a reasonable pace. It seemed obvious to her, though, that the three of them really hated taking instructions from her, and she assumed that it was because she was a woman. Maybe where they come from, she thought, maybe they bring their women up to be silent and compliant. Which, in her opinion, was too fucking bad, because they were in New York now. But it didn’t necessarily have to be that, she was willing to admit that perhaps they hadn’t cared for Frank Waters any better, maybe they hated New York and everyone in it, maybe they hated everyone who wasn’t like they were, hell, maybe they hated everyone, period. The youngest of them, the kid, she thought that maybe under better circumstances they would have gotten along okay, they may have been able to connect, the way normal people do. He still wouldn’t make eye contact with her, but when he did stare it seemed that his eyes were filled with a sort of forlorn desire, he looked like a guy mooning at a new car that he desperately wanted but could not afford. It was a small comfort to her that at least he did not seem to despise her the way Raffi did. She continued to ride them all, questioning their family origins, manhood, and sexual preferences. She watched them seethe and squirm, all except the kid, who took it better than the rest of them. She even let him drive the forklift after a while.

  Vincenzo, she told herself. The other two are just bodies. Vincenzo’s the one you gotta watch . . .

  Once they got the crate in through one of the big roll-up doors and shoved into position, Paolo Torrente came out of his office and fussed over it like a mother hen who’d just located a lost chick. Al ignored him and looked around. There was a shiny new Chevy Suburban parked just inside one of the other roll-up doors. It didn’t look exactly like the one Frank Waters had been driving, because it didn’t have chrome spinners and the windows weren’t tinted. Al tried not to stare too hard at it. As for the rest of the building, it still looked like the former truck garage that it was, but one whole side of the place was devoted to metal racks that were filled with cartons labeled in Italian, French, Spanish, and some other languages she didn’t recognize. “Paolo,” she said. “No German. How come?”

  “German!?” He looked at her, horrified. “German? Liebfraumilch? My God! Bleah! Nobody gonna drink that es-stuff! Never mind German, I give you something special to take home tonight.” He approached her, grabbed her by both shoulders, and planted a kiss on each of her cheeks. “I am so relieve, you don’t believe. I thought maybe these guys wasa destroy me.”

  Raffi and Vincenzo turned away in disgust while the kid watched her from a safe distance.

  So, Al thought, what the hell’s in the crate?

  Damned heavy, whatever it was.

  Come on, Al, she told herself, who you kidding? You got Uncle Paolo Torrente from Palermo, Italy, he comes to New York City looking to expand his family business. Buys a warehouse. Pays cash for it. Hires Frank Waters to clear the way for him. And what then? Did Frank Waters see something he wasn’t supposed to see? Did he try to cut himself in for a bigger piece of the pie? After all, Frank was the kind of guy who always dreamed of making it big.

  Of course, the crate could be full of boxes, and the boxes could be full of bottles of wine. Hey, that is the business these guys are supposed to be in. Right?

  No way to tell from the exterior of the crate what was inside it. There was some writing on the side, but none of it made any sense to Al. And there was one marking in particular that caught her eye, it was a rectangular-shaped set of dots and lines, sort of a bar code but more complicated.

  Come on, Al, she thought, why are you making this harder than it has to be? Whatever Palermo Imports is really bringing into the country, a buck buys you ten you either snort it or shoot it or smoke it. And those nutcases working here, their function is not to unload the trucks, that’s why they whined so much about having to do it. Vincenzo looked like the enforcer, the hand-to-hand specialist. And that fucking little ferret Raffi, Al bet herself that his real skill was with a garrote or a knife or a pistol, not a forklift. “You don’t speak English . . . , tomorrow . . . I send you home.” Al hadn’t given a lot of thought to that when Paolo had said it, but the strangeness of it came back to her now. Why would you say that to a guy you hired off the corner? Why wouldn’t you just say, “You’re fired, get the fuck out”? No, you said that if you were threatening to put the guy on a plane back to wherever he came from. Wherever they all came from.

  Another friggin’ dope operation, Al thought. Got real wine being imported and probably even sold, it’s the perfect cover. You could bring your shit in with the same containers, who the hell would know the difference? Nobody, not unless they had the machine to read that bar code. And Customs couldn’t inspect every container that came into Port Newark, they couldn’t even come close. They didn’t have the budget and they didn’t have the personnel. Al took her cell phone off her belt, flipped it open, toggled on the camera function, held it up to her ear, and pretended to take a call.

  Al left Palermo Imports at four in the afternoon, three hundred bucks cash in her pocket. Uncle Paolo had been effusive in his praise of her, had made a show of writing down her cell number. Her three compatriots lagged behind, probably, she thought, so they could bitch to Torrente about all the abuse they’d had to take from her. Torrente, however, seemed happy as hell that his two crates had gotten unloaded and moved into the warehouse. Al climbed the hill up to the spot where she’d parked her uncle’s van, right across the street from the place she’d parked it the previous day. She slumped in the driver’s seat for a while, expecting Raffi and his guys to come out, but the doors to Palermo Imports stayed closed.

  Maybe Paolo’s got those characters sleeping inside the warehouse, she thought. Maybe he just lets them out for an hour or so in the evening so they can get some dinner or something. But no way he hired them off the street. Wherever Paolo came from, whatever he was really doing, those three were a part of the package.

  She called the office phone at Houston Investigations, was surprised when Sarah Waters answered. “Hey, killer,” Al said.

  “Hey,” Sarah said. Her voice was lifeless.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Sarah said. “I guess I’m getting down about Frankie. If he was alive, he’d of turned up by now. I mean, the more time goes by, the worse, you know, I mean, the slimmer his chances are.”

  Al wanted to remind Sarah that Frank was a creep and a deadbeat dad, but she didn’t. “Don’t start digging the hole yet,” Al told her. “Let’s wait and see what we find, first.”

  “But I knew something like this was gonna happen to him someday,” Sarah said. “I knew it.”

  “Sarah, for all we know, he could be shacked up in Jersey somewhere. He’s probably sitting in some fleabag motel right now, got his feet up, be drinking beer and watching Jeopardy.”

  “Too intellectual,” Sarah said. “Wheel of Fortune, maybe, or The Girls Next Door.”

  “Whatever. Listen, I spent the day at Palermo Imports. I got some pictures, I got head shots of three head cases that work there, and I got some close-ups of the markings on two big-ass crates we unloaded. I don’t know what the markings mean, some of it is in some language I don’t recognize, and there are some symbols that I couldn’t begin to decipher. I’m gonna come in later tonight and download ’em. Can you take a look at them tomorrow? Maybe you can figure out what the hell these guys are actually importing.”

  “No problem,” Sarah said. “Listen, you sound tired. Why don’t you just go home an
d e-mail them to me from there? Save yourself a trip, get some rest.”

  “I don’t have a PC at home,” Al told her. In fact, there was very little in the empty room she lived in to make it feel like anything more than a bus-stop shelter with a door and a window. “So if I got to go to the library to download ’em, I might just as well come in to the office and do it there.”

  “Okay,” Sarah said. “Or if you wanna stop at my mom’s place . . . We could use Frankie Junior’s computer.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Al told her. “I’m all right. Just tired.”

  “Gotcha. You get a picture of Uncle Paolo?”

  “No,” Al said. “The other three were no problem, but if I want a shot of Uncle Paolo, I’m gonna have to get it with a telephoto lens.”

  “We’ve got something like that here, don’t we?”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  “Okay. Listen, you got two calls. One from a guy calls himself Doc, says you and he are old friends. Says he needs to talk to you. And the other was from some guy at something called the Irish-American Mothers and Fathers Association. His accent was so thick I barely understood him. Said he’d call back.”

  “Oh, great,” Al said. “I wonder who the hell that could be. That just sounds like bad news. Listen, I gotta run, the kid from Palermo Imports just came out, he’s walking this way. I wanna climb into the back where he can’t see me, I’m gonna change clothes real quick, I need to see where this kid goes. Don’t forget to look at those pictures for me.”

  Sarah Waters did not like the looks of the cab driver. “You wan’ me to wait for you?” he asked her. “If you wan’, I wait and take you back.”

  “I might be a while,” she told the guy. Sarah was Brooklyn born and raised, she had the accent, the survival instinct, and the heightened awareness of a Brooklyn native.