A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

  Try to imagine your worst nightmare come to life. Imagine you’ve been having the same dream for fifteen years, at least twice per week, that each time you awaken in a panic and that your dream is so intensely private it cannot be shared with priest or psychiatrist. And then, one sunny afternoon, it jumps out of hiding in the form of two FBI agents and grabs you, Julio Ramirez, immigrant, barber, spy, and whisks you away to a small office in Queens.

  If you have a strong imagination, you are shaking the way Julio Ramirez shook, his right knee jerking uncontrollably as he sat in a straight-backed chair across from a smiling George Bradley and scowling Leonora Higgins. For the third time, Bradley repeated his position quietly.

  “Mr. Ramirez, we know you delivered a vanload of ordnance to the American Red Army. We know you picked up the van at a garage in Bay Ridge and drove it to 31st Street in Astoria. We know you passed it on to an active member of the Red Army. Why are you wasting our time?”

  Julio coughed up the last remaining bits of his courage. “If you know so good, you tell me who tell you?”

  “Can’t do that, Julio.”

  “Let’s stop the bullshit,” Leonora broke in, her voice hard and firm. “Let’s just bury the asshole.”

  “Don’t be so hasty, Leonora. Let’s give him a chance to come around.”

  “If you got me,” Julio said, “how come you don’t arrest me? What you gonna do in court if you can’t say who tell you this about me.”

  “Court?” Leonora broke into laughter, then snapped it off abruptly. “Asshole, the one thing you don’t have to worry about is jail. You’ll wish you were in jail. Do you happen to know the Havana Moon Bar on Kennedy Boulevard in Union City? Do you know Esteban Perez, the owner?”

  Julio shook so badly the coins in his pockets began to jingle. Esteban Perez was known in the Cuban community as the public head of the anti-Castro Cubans in the United States. There were others, of course, whose jobs were to carry out the directives of public figures like Perez, but these names were not well known, and although the FBI had a few in their files, Leonora, in mentioning the name of Perez, was able to scare the hell out of Julio Ramirez without giving anything away. At that point, she was not yet aware of how innocuous and expendable Ramirez was.

  “Suppose,” Leonora continued, “we mention, in the course of general conversation, that a certain barber, Julio Ramirez, is really a spy who reports to the Cuban Mission every month? Do you think he’ll ask for proof? No? What do you think will happen to you when he finds out? What do you think will happen to your family? Do you have children, Julio?”

  A long silence followed. The two FBI agents could sense that Ramirez was about to break, but they were totally unprepared for the mixed torrent of tears and words that poured from the hapless spy. No, he did not want to be a spy. He was not a Communist. It had all been a mistake, but how could he get out of it? Now he wanted only to serve his country. He wanted to be an American, like his neighbors. Would the FBI please help him and his family?

  They worked him over for the next three hours. He readily named his contact at the Cuban Mission, a man they already knew. He recalled every detail of his delivery of the weapons, except for the description of the man who met him in Astoria. He had been afraid of this man, afraid to look too closely. And it had been dark underneath the el. He wanted to help them, he sincerely wanted to, but this was all he knew.

  Finally, it sunk in. Almost at the same time, Leonora Higgins and George Bradley concluded that they were not going to get any closer to Muzzafer and his army by using Julio Ramirez, that they had wasted their time, that they were back at the same dead end. Bradley spoke first.

  “OK, Ramirez, out of here.”

  Ramirez stood up quickly, but remained by his chair. “What do you want me to do? Do you want to use me? What do you want?”

  “I want you to get out of here.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Jesus Christ, man, will you just go?” Bradley’s frustration finally pushed the Cuban into action and he was out the door without another word.

  “I never saw a man open up so easily,” Leonora remarked.

  “Right,” Bradley agreed, his voice tinged with irony. “Why is it only the ones with nothing to tell are willing to tell? Leonora, the bureau’s crawling up my back on this one and I just don’t have a clue about what to do next.”

  Leonora shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not like we’ve left anything undone. Do they think we’re spending our time on the beach?”

  “They don’t care. They want results.”

  “How about Julio?”

  “He’s not results.”

  “Still, what are you planning to do about him? Do you want to use him?”

  “Oh, I’m going to use him all right.” For the first time, Bradley smiled. “I owe Esteban Perez a favor and I think that favor is going to be Julio Ramirez.”

  Leonora sat bolt upright. “You can’t do that.”

  Bradley looked across at her, surprised by the conviction in her voice. “Why not?”

  “They’ll kill him.”

  “So? He’s a spy.”

  “He gave us all he had. You can’t just execute him. It’s not right.”

  Bradley began to laugh. “Not right? He’s perfect. We have no use for him whatsoever, but he’ll make those crazy Cubans very happy. Perez’ll take credit and build his own reputation. Then, instead of me owing him a favor, he’ll owe me. I like my ledger unbalanced on the credit side.”

  “But…”

  “Enough, Leonora, that’s the way it’s done. Ramirez was never a player. He was a pawn from the first day. Not even a pawn. A fiftieth of a pawn. No one will miss him.”

  “How about his wife and kids?”

  12

  NEW YORK CITY TRAFFIC. If you’ve been here you know. You know, for instance that, at least once a week, the mayor goes on record as advising (actually, begging) motorists to take mass transit, to leave their cars at home, to use buses and subways. The citizens refuse, of course, even though parking violation fines, as well as parking garage fees, seem to rise monthly, while hundreds of small, brown tow trucks cruise midtown Manhattan, looking for illegally parked cars. The price of the tow, seventy-five dollars (cash only), plus a trip to a pier on 39th and the Hudson River, plus a thirty-five-dollar parking ticket, does not, apparently, deter motorists, because the pier is always full. Every street, it seems, between 57th and 23rd, from river to river, is lined with double-parked cars and trucks and the ten million parking tickets issued each year are accepted as a cost of doing business.

  And nowhere in Manhattan, not in the Battery with its narrow, dark streets or at the East River bridges and tunnels, is traffic worse than on the West Side of Manhattan between 23rd and 42nd streets. Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Broadway… it doesn’t seem to matter what time of the day, 8 AM to 8 PM, the professional driver expects long delays while the occasional visitor squirms behind the wheel, peering around other vehicles, wondering when it will break up. Drivers scream, curse, and cut each other off as double-or triple-parked trucks compete with Con Edison or New York Telephone excavations to create the world’s largest moving obstacle course. Here, as many pedestrians walk in the street as on the sidewalk, and the local garment manufacturers transfer materials from loft to loft by means of pushcarts, it is not uncommon for two workers to shove a cart loaded down with a dozen bolts of cloth right up against the bumper of an oncoming car, daring the driver to do anything about it. Then everyone waits. Waits for the altercation to stop, for the cops to show up, for anything that will allow the traffic to start forward.

  Northbound Sixth Avenue has its own special set of problems. To people unused to it, the way traffic moves freely between 14th and 23rd streets, only to stop dead at 24th, seems almost miraculous. Yet this pattern repeats itself every day, because at 34th and Sixth, Herald Square, where Broadway crosses Sixth Avenue, the traffic light is split three ways and the endless mass of pedestrians lowers t
he green time still further. This is also the wholesale plant and flower district and the curbs from 26th to 30th are lined with a jungle of potted tropical plants and with the trucks that ferry them about. The florists occupy most of the storefronts along that part of Sixth, but, scattered here and there amid the foliage, are discount electronic stores, each specializing in the ‘guaranteed lowest prices’ for cameras, tape recorders, VCRs, ghetto blasters—anything electronic. At the northern end of the log jam is Herald Square, a small patch of concrete featuring an enormous bronze angel poised above a bell, with its two most famous residents, Macy’s and the now defunct Gimbels, occupying the block between Sixth Avenue and Penn Station to the west. Herald Center, a newly constructed, seven-story, black glass mall, reputed to be owned by Ferdinand Marcos, fits like a sandwich between the two giants.

  Even on normal days, this area in the heart of New York’s garment center resembles a beehive, with humans seeming to crawl over one another as they push their way along the sidewalk or thread their way between cars. On Good Friday, however, two days before Easter, with the temperature near seventy and a warm sun flooding Manhattan, the traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, is virtually at a standstill.

  Nevertheless, in spite of these difficulties and every other argument Stanley Moodrow could muster, Good Friday was the day Rita Melengic chose to fulfill her promise to buy Moodrow a new suit with part of her casino winnings. If, while she was at it, she filled out her own spring wardrobe, it, as she patiently explained, couldn’t hurt. Moodrow, however, dug in his heels on this particular point.

  “I’m not gonna follow you around Macy’s all day. Forget it. I hate shopping and you know it,” he said, and neither her arms around his neck, nor her breasts pressing against his back, could budge him.

  “Well, you’re gonna get a new suit anyway. That’s a rag you’ve got on.”

  “C’mon, Rita, not tomorrow. For Christ’s sake, the stores’ll be packed. Let’s put it off.”

  “No, A&S is openin’ a new store where Gimbels used to be and they’re havin’ unbelievable sales. We’ll never get another chance like this.”

  “But I gotta work tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Stanley, don’t ruin it.”

  In the end he could not endure the look of disappointment on her face and had to give in. “OK, OK. I gotta go over to Pulaski’s around noon. Meet me on the Sixth Avenue side of A&S around two.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “But I could be late. Don’t hold me to the minute.”

  Later on, Rita showed her gratitude by waiting until Moodrow was asleep, handcuffing him to the bedrail, then forcing him to redeem the keys by performing five different acts, three of which are illegal in the states of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Alaska.

  Pulaski’s Funeral Home, on 11th Street between First and Avenue A, had been a fixture on the Lower East Side for thirty-five years. Two stories high, it encompassed the width of three storefronts and was, thus, a perfect target for a new breed of entrepreneurs looking to open trendy boutiques, art galleries, and nouvelle cuisine restaurants. It seemed that the East Village, long a stable section for the working and nonworking poor had become, in the insane world of 80s Manhattan real estate, a prime area for upward development. The process was called gentrification by the local press. The reasoning was that if apartments in ‘good’ neighborhoods go for $1200 per room, there must be suckers willing to pay $800 to live in a tenement. The same principle applied to commercial properties and small businesses like Pulaski’s Funeral Home, which upon coming to the end of ten-and fifteen-year leases found monthly rents of eight or nine hundred dollars jumped to eight or nine thousand. There was no way for these “mom and pop” establishments to come up with that kind of cash. Greedy landlords, operating virtually without regulation when it came to commercial properties, often demanded deposits of three months’ rent as security, while an utterly indifferent mayor roamed the country, promoting his memoirs.

  But Stanley Moodrow was the fixer, the cop with the reputation for straightening out problems and Mrs. Pulaski had called him at the precinct, demanding, “You come. You come,” and refusing to take any excuse. So, at twelve o’clock on Good Friday, Moodrow found himself in an empty side room of the Home, a coffee cup on a table by his side, listening to an excited old lady pour out her troubles.

  “I come here nineteen and forty-five. I come away from war in Europe. I am Jewish woman and I am afraid of Nazi even if husband is Polish. So Juroslaw bring me here. Right away we use money to buy funeral home. Thirty-seven year on 11th Street we bury thousands of countrymen. Every time we pay rent on first of month. We become citizen. We vote. Our son is lawyer. Son-in-law work business. All good. Now lease running out and building owner is Arab. He say $8,000 every month and twenty thousand for deposit. What we do? Thirty-seven year, Stanley. What we do?”

  Moodrow sat quietly, somewhat bored, trying to nod his head at the right times. He’d been hearing the story more and more lately, and he was sorely tempted to beg off, but Sarah Pulaski was a legend in the neighborhood. Her strength and endurance had long symbolized, for him, the tenacity of the residents of this polyglot ghetto. Jews, Poles, Urkrainians, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Italians—for generations the Lower East Side had held on to its identity and now, under the onslaught of the real estate moguls, it was starting to come apart.

  “Who’s the landlord? Achmed?”

  “Yes. The bastard.” She made a rude gesture, learned from an Italian neighbor thirty years ago, by placing her thumb under her upper teeth and snapping the nail forward.

  “I know him. Tell me, Mother, how much can you pay?”

  “Not one cent extra. Eight hundred dollars.”

  “In that case,” Moodrow replied evenly, “you might as well pack right now.”

  They negotiated for an hour with Sarah jumping up every five minutes or so to consult an enormous ledger, before Moodrow left with a figure he thought the Arab might accept. Being a capitalist himself, Moodrow was not surprised that Achmed was out to extract the greatest possible profit from his investments. However, there was a good chance the Arab, an intensely proud man, would come down somewhat if Moodrow was careful to show him the same respect as on previous encounters. Clearly, if the Pulaskis moved out, the two floors would have to be completely renovated. This would leave the store vacant for months in addition to requiring a heavy capital investment. The Pulaski clan was willing to go to $4,500 with an $8,000 security deposit. They were extremely reliable tenants and not likely to miss payments or walk away from a losing proposition six months into the lease. Moodrow knew he had a chance and the expectation of doing a good deed left him, as always, in a decent mood.

  It was 1:00 when Moodrow left Pulaski’s Funeral Home. He would have liked to head out immediately for his meeting with Rita, but he had another stop to make first. This one, he hoped, would not take as long. It would definitely be unpalatable. He had to see Mickey Vogel, a longtime junkie-informant who had gone so far into his addiction that he no longer had any names more important than common street dealers to sell. He’d called Moodrow at the precinct the night before and begged for a meeting. Moodrow had no doubt that he needed money to buy heroin and that he would offer some local pusher as his end of the bargain. This Moodrow did not need and, as he drove south toward Pitt Street, the cop knew he would be saying goodbye to Mickey Vogel.

  The reality was even worse than Moodrow expected. A single roach-infested room in a welfare hotel, a desperately sick junkie, snot rolling over his mouth and down his chin, an all-pervasive smell of vomit and sweat hanging over the room—it permeated the bed and the single soiled sheet. Even the walls were filled with it.

  “I got a good one for ya today, Sarge.” Vogel began, mustering up one last hustle. In his own way and for completely different reasons, he mirrored the emotional condition of Julio Ramirez in the hands of the FBI.

  “Forget it Mickey. Not this time.”

  “Whatta ya mean? I got a b
ig one. I got the Indian. I got the fuckin’ Indian cold. All I need’s enough bread ta score and he’s yours.” When Moodrow didn’t answer, the junkie tried to go on, but quickly broke into a dry, hacking cough.

  “Look, Mickey,” Moodrow finally said. “I could have the Indian whenever I want. It’s over. You gotta clean up.”

  Vogel began to cry, almost as Julio had cried. “I’m dyin’ here. Don’t ya understand? I’m thirty-three years old and I’m dyin’ here.”

  “Methadone. The clinic,” Moodrow said softly.

  “That’s thirty days’ lockup. Suppose some of the guys in there know about me?”

  Moodrow stood up to leave. “Listen, I’m in a hurry. I just want to say I’ve seen a thousand junkies in your spot. Look at your fuckin’ arms. It’s over. You gotta come down now. You say go ahead I could get you in a clinic at Jamaica Hospital tomorrow morning. They’ll bring you down slow. Feed you. Give you clothes. In thirty days you’ll walk out with a tube of methadone and a feeling like you’re a human again. But that’s all I could do. Rockefeller ain’t got the money to feed your habit. Think it over and call me tonight.”

  “Ya gotta help me…” Mickey reached out as if to hold Moodrow back, but the sergeant just brushed by him and went out the door. Getting the maximum out of an informant and then dropping him is a common scenario for cops. In this situation, in offering to use his influence to place Vogel in a clinic, Moodrow was doing more than most. In any event, he certainly appreciated the beautiful spring day after breathing the foul atmosphere of the junkie’s room. It was two o’clock when he stepped out onto Pitt Street, two blocks from the precinct. For a moment, he considered taking his unmarked car over to A&S, but he knew there would be no place to park, that even the garages would be full, the traffic unbearable, so he drove to the stationhouse and turned the keys over to the desk sergeant. Then he grabbed hold of the first blue and white cruiser he saw, and begged a ride to midtown.