“There is no point in carrying around an empty gun, Zesty. It shows either a lack of nerve or the ability to bluff with no hand at all. Did you check the chamber, Tito?”
“No, patron.” Tito looks at me like he wants to eat my entrails.
Did I?
And before I can think to remember, I hear the snick of Moreno pulling the trigger, see a bright explosion of fire as something connects to the side of my temple, the L-shaped alley swirling above me like a black tornado lifting toward the sky. I hear a metallic clink as I slip toward darkness, the last light across my field of vision a smudge of blue-orange flame, followed by the fuse glow of a lit cigarette, the deep crackle of tobacco, and the ceremonial incense of a Saturday night havdalah candle from deep in my memory. Clove smoke, the chanting of ghosts, and then darkness, blessed darkness.
FOURTEEN
I fall in love too easily, there’s no sense in denying it. It’s become a reflex of sorts, like your knee jumping to the tap of a rubber-tipped hammer. It doesn’t take much, really: a glance or a curve (too often a curve) and off I stumble. Arguably, it’s my most consistent trait, this lack of emotional discipline. My Cupid long ago ditched his bow and arrow and now hunts with a net.
I come-to half sitting, half slumped in the darkened doorway where I’d unscrewed the vestibule light. Cleopatra from the bar is sitting beside me, smoke languidly drifting from her mouth forming a wispy heart-shaped valentine above her.
I want to say something witty but there’s still that tuning fork vibrato in my ears overlaid now with a wobbling hiss like someone’s left the needle on a warped and badly scratched record. I turn to the side and vomit onto the pavement.
“Ay yo!” Cleopatra springs to her feet, smudging the smoke-heart. She’s covered up her haltertop with a black satin jacket and towers over me in skintight black leather pants and high heels that tap out the annoyance of someone who’s got somewhere else they’d rather be.
“Here.” She stops the Savion Glover routine long enough to hand me a bottle of water and shoot me a withering glance. I spit, gargle, and spit again, using my tongue to count my teeth, starting to take inventory. Not too bad considering, except for the ringing headache, maybe a little swelling around the eye that might be purple, half closed, half sexy, by tomorrow.
Accentuate the positive.
“Can you stand up?”
“Not yet. The record’s still skipping.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just give me a minute.” I extend the bottle back to Cleopatra.
“You’re joking, right?” She takes a monster drag off her cigarette, flicks the butt off my spokes.
I stand up slowly, glancing toward the Hacienda, a wave of music spilling into the street every time the door opens. The smoking crew isn’t out front anymore, nobody coming in or out of the alley. My empty bag is dangling off the handlebars of my Trek still locked to the pole. I look back to the bar.
“What are you, fucking crazy?” Cleopatra says, following my eyes. “They’re not there anymore and you ain’t getting shit back anyway.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Just that.” She rears back. “Can you maybe try not to stare at my chest?” She zips the satin jacket to her neck, shakes out her hair.
“I apologize. Bad habit; I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”
“You weren’t.” She laughs. “I was just fucking with you. You’re still loopy. Why don’t you sit back down?”
“I’m all right,” I say. Now I am looking at her chest, but really only to gauge my recovery. In love? Check.
“What’s your name?” I make my move.
“I don’t think so.” Cleopatra shakes her head slowly, rolling her eyes.
“Strange name,” I say.
“Funny. Listen up, Romeo. Likely, you got a concussion. I’ve seen a few in my day. If you keep vomiting, go to a hospital. And if you won’t do that, at the very least try not to go to sleep tonight. Think you can handle that?”
“I might need a little help with that last one.” I try to wink at her, but I’m pretty sure it comes off as a grimace.
“Wow, you’re just relentless, aren’t you? And either dumb as rocks or you got a fuckin’ set on you, waltzing into the lion’s den like that. I don’t know what kind of business you got with Moreno and his people, but you sure know how to step in it. Want some unsolicited advice?”
“Not really.” I rub my temples gently.
“Rhetorical question,” Cleopatra says. “Stay in Whiteyville. Which at this point is like ninety-nine percent of the fucking city anyhow. How come you got to come around here to make trouble?”
“I don’t even know what to say to that,” I admit. “Except what the hell did I ever do to you?”
“Nothing. I got housing issues.” She lights another cigarette, doesn’t offer me one. “Don’t take it personal.”
“So why are you still here?”
“Moreno gave me two hundred bucks to stay with you until your friend showed, make sure you were okay.”
“What friend?”
“Fucked if I know. I just started dialing the contacts in your phone. You know, getting a volunteer to come pick your ass up was like trying to sell Ebola. Someone’s on the way, though. And damn, if that girl ain’t got a mouth on her. And if I’m not mistaken, here she is now. Hope your bike comes apart, Romeo. Ain’t no way it’s fitting into that clown car.”
FIFTEEN
“Can we drive around a little?” I’ve got one arm out the window holding my bike in place on the domed roof of Martha’s Volkswagen Bug, Zero’s Zen Moving T-shirt wrapped around the toe clip so it doesn’t scratch the paint. “I need to clear my head.”
We cruise Centre Street back the way I’d come, the copper bracelets stacked from Martha’s wrists to her forearms jangling with all the subtlety of advancing heavy artillery every time she hits a pothole. The street’s newly paved, but I know for a fact that every night while Boston sleeps the DPW sends out work crews to pickax potholes halfway to China—two guys doing the heavy work while three supervisors hone their Win for Life ticket-scratch lottery form.
We swing a right onto Huntington riding in silence, configuring our ears to the city’s late-night rhythms, the audible pop-wink of streetlights as they change from red to green, cruise past the flickering of fluorescents inside the new Northeastern buildings as maintenance crews go about their business clicking office switches, opening windows, running vacuums and floor polishers that mimic the sound of distant traffic, steady as waves breaking ashore.
We cross Mass Ave. gliding parallel to the Christian Science Monitor reflecting pool before hanging a right on West Newton, taking it deep into the South End, the flat streets deserted now, the neighborhood folded in on itself like a box with its flaps pulled closed. We pass handsome turn-of-the-century townhouses on streets lined with trees not yet ready to give up their leaves; meander until we hit Blackstone Square, where we exit the Bug and sit on a bench facing Washington Street. There’s a smattering of silver clouds but they give way to a paper moon hanging high above us, our bodies backlit like Kabuki theater, shadows stretching like ghost taffy over the curb.
“Ho, shit.” Martha winces, catching better sight of the bruise and swelling I can feel coming in under my eye. Down-breeze I catch her familiar scent—white chocolate, cocoa butter.
“You should see the other guy” is all I manage.
“Really? What’d you do, beat him with your face? Don’t answer that. Tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into this time. All of it.”
I do as I’m told, starting with Alianna Solarte and ending with my beating at the hands of Los Fuckwads.
“It’s not Charlie’s gun,” Martha says when I run out of words. “But really, Zesty? After what you went through with your dad and Gus, you’re stepping into someone else’s shit again? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“All I did was take a job, Martha.”
“You’re a
messenger, Zesty, not a fucking detective.”
“We need the money, don’t we?”
“Not that bad we don’t.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Charlie. What do you mean it’s not his gun?”
“Just that. Not.” Martha enunciates at a glacial pace. “His.”
“So who—”
“One of his vet buddies who he managed to talk off the proverbial ledge.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Only I don’t know what to tell you, it’s gone now.”
“You know, Zesty.” Martha shimmies a shrug, dips her head between her legs, and fluffs out her straight blond hair. “Honestly? I think you did them both a solid getting it off their hands. It’s not like Charlie’s in such a good place himself. Talk about the blind leading the blind.”
More like the wounded leading the shell-shocked. Only problem was, now the gun’s in Moreno’s hands and who the hell knows what he might do with it? Could it be traced back to Charlie’s buddy? Or me and Charlie if our prints are still somewhere on it?
“Charlie tell you he lost his apartment in Medford?”
“He did. Landlord raised the rent and told him he should be thankful, that he’d put it off as long as he did. You know, on account of his veteran status. Then he offered him a hundred bucks for his Purple Heart. How fucked up is that?”
I shake my head slowly, a touch of static drifting in and out on a weak signal.
“Do you ever get the feeling that maybe this city’s moving along without us, Martha? Like maybe we’re some kind of dinosaur who’s just too stupid to adapt to change?”
“More and more every fucking day, Zesty.”
“So how long do you think you’ll keep doing this?”
“I don’t know.” Martha offers me a rare sweet smile. “How long you planning on staying in business?”
“Long as I can.”
“Well then, there you have it. But what’s on your mind, Zesty? What aren’t you telling me?”
Like I said, to Martha my head might as well be made of glass: “I had this conversation with Zero earlier … about my dad. It wasn’t the type of talk we’ve ever had before.”
“How so?”
I try to think of the right word to explain it to Martha, to myself. “Zero was conceding,” I say. “To the Alzheimer’s. To the disease. Not giving in, just, I dunno, facing the reality of it, seeing everything for what it really is. He told me I needed to start preparing myself. For the end.”
“How do you do that?”
“That,” I point at Martha, muster a weak smile, “he didn’t say.”
“What’s he doing to prepare himself?”
“I’m not sure. But I think he’s right, though, that I’ve been avoiding thinking about it, putting it on the back burner, which I guess is how I handle most of my shit. Only now, with everything that’s happened with my dad the last couple of years, it’s sped up the timetable on him. He’s gotten real old too fast. This isn’t the way I want to remember him, Martha.”
“Is that why you’ve come back to work?”
“I guess. I have a hard time seeing him like this. The more time I spend at his place, this image of him, weak and dependent … the way he is now feels more permanent inside me. Like it’s pushing out all the other memories I have of him. All the good times, how strong he was to push through all the heartbreak and disappointment he had to overcome to raise Zero and me. Does that make any sense to you?”
“It does. It makes perfect sense. But don’t sell yourself short, Zesty. You’ve been a good son. You and Zero. Present. Loyal. Resilient. These are things your father taught you, it didn’t come from nowhere. You want to remember your dad as he was, you just need to keep being you. Live the way you want to live and don’t let others define you, tell you where you belong. You understand what I’m saying, Zesty?”
“I think so.”
“Good. So hey, I got a little sideways question for you, then: Did your dad ever host any of his poker games at the Western Front, that old club in Cambridgeport?”
I can’t help but smile. The Western Front was long gone, but at one time it was the hub of the Boston reggae scene, what little there was of it. And though my father never did host his game there—it was a resolutely black Jamaican club in what was once a rough patch of working-class Cambridge—he’d sometimes bring me and Zero there whenever someone like Sugar Minott or Beres Hammond was in town, headliners that could fill stadiums in Europe but only a small club in a racially charged Boston.
“The Western Front? Nah. But it might be the first place I ever got high, all the smoke up in there. Why do you ask?”
“I was looking through those pictures Solarte emailed us. I grew up just a couple blocks from there and recognized the corner. And Zero?”
“And Zero what?”
“He liked the Western Front?”
“Not so much.” If Zero had to smell that much weed he’d prefer it in the bleachers, where a cloud of pot smoke would hang over the pitcher’s bullpen and a misplaced punch of a beach ball in the cheap-ticket crowd would incite a small riot.
“But speaking of those pictures, I’ve got about an hour to kill, can we hit the office and take a look at the rest of them?”
“What for?”
“I’m not sure, but there’s something about Andino that feels like I should know already but just can’t get at.”
“It can’t wait?”
“No. There’s somewhere I gotta be soon.”
“At this hour?”
I’d promised Brill I’d return to keep scraping paint off his bricks if he kept paying me in cold hard cash. It was hard dirty work, but there was something gratifying about it, maybe because as I chipped away I could get a sense of what it would look like when it was done, a more visible progress in the work than I was accustomed to. I also had the odd sensation that stripping the layers would free the ghosts trapped inside those walls to let them sleep in their own rooms again.
My own sleep will have to wait. I have bills to pay, too many jobs to do, and between my ears still the hiss of a needle spinning on an empty groove, only now accompanied by the echo of Martine Andino working the strings of his acoustic Gibson, laying down tracks for the Angel of Death singing softly in my ear. It’s a voice I’ve heard calling to me before, but she sounds so much sweeter now.
Soon, she sings. Soon.
SIXTEEN
“So, what exactly am I looking at?” We’d already shuffled through the three pictures of Martine Andino standing at the corner where the Western Front had been and now we’re looking at him killing time on Green Street just off Central Square, smoking a cigarette and doing a whole lot of nada. And then more of the same nothing, only in front of the entranceway of a shop on Newbury Street, NEWBURY COMICS visible in the reflection of the storefront window. Diddly in the Fens at 88 Queensbury Street with a confused look on his dark face. Andino in the same clothes Alianna had photographed in her office—faded jeans, a worn pair of cowboy boots, black turtleneck—loitering downtown on Broad Street.
In none of the pictures is Andino meeting with anyone, exchanging envelopes, or leaving a newspaper on a park bench to be picked up by a jittery Matt Damon. Lunch in the Middle East café, window seat, far corner table with his back to the wall. Coffee at Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, same spot: window, corner, so he can see the entire restaurant, the sidewalk, and the door. Nobody gets behind this guy. Careful. Possibly paranoid. World Beating People Watcher. Had Solarte noticed the trend?
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.” But whatever it is, I don’t see it in the next series where Solarte had captured Andino buying what looks like clove cigarettes from Leavitt & Peirce. Andino smoking those cigarettes while watching the next Tracy Chapman play guitar. Andino dropping a handful of bills into the open case before her.
Generous.
“Well, to me he looks like a tourist wandering around town maybe a little lost, a little lonely.” Martha ch
ews through the last of the pictures. “Solarte didn’t tell you why she’s tailing him?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t tell you how dangerous it might be? What you were supposed to be looking for?”
“Nope. Just follow and—Hold on. Scroll back to that shot on Green Street.”
“Why?” Martha clicks back until she gets to the right one.
“I’m not sure,” I say, but then I see the pattern. “Look at the way he’s looking up at the building. All the buildings. And doesn’t go into any of them. Now click the previous one.” Martha does. This one of Andino in the Fens on the corner of Kilmarnock and Queensbury and then again Andino downtown on Broad Street. Two of the buildings residential, Broad Street strictly commercial.
“Look how he’s just standing there staring at the buildings or with his back to them, scoping the neighborhood.”
“I see. But so what? And why these spots? There’s not much there.”
The only common denominator I can see, beyond the somewhat vague and disappointed look on Andino’s face, is the fact that most of the buildings are of relatively new construction, which from an architectural standpoint is a disappointment, but to a mover likely means a working elevator and wider staircases.
Without my having to ask, Martha Googles the address in the Fens and reads aloud, “Eighty-eight Queensbury Street. Built on the former site of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, an iconic Boston bar named after the Rolling Stones song … You remember that place?”
“Before my time, but I’ve seen pictures of my father there, back when he was part of that scene. The marquee had those giant red lips.”
“Was that one of his poker places?”
“I don’t think so.”
Martha replicates the search for Green Street in Cambridge and Broad Street downtown and comes up with two other former music clubs, Green Street Station and Cantone’s, both once popular venues that had closed years ago.
“So all three spots were former nightclubs,” Martha muses aloud. “And the Western Front makes four. You think he’s what, like taking a tour down memory lane? The All the Places I Got Laid in My Youth tour?”
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