Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  It was an already gloomy day, and the street was made darker by the train tracks overhead. No one seemed to care. There were lots of people on the sidewalks and taxis pouring down toward Manhattan, and the constant cacophony of horns and casual verbal abuse. We were moving slowly so I wound down the window and took it in.

  There are so many New Yorkers in Florida that fugedaboutit is practically local vernacular, but that isn’t to say any part of Florida feels like New York. In a city with so many humans jammed in so small a space, people have to fight for their share of real estate. Whether it’s housing, driving, walking, getting a table in a restaurant or a seat at the ballpark, there’s always a hundred other people vying for whatever you’re after. It makes people forthright and brusque. They don’t have time to waste on tact. Folks from other places often find New Yorkers rude and overbearing, but they don’t understand the context. The loudest baby bird gets the worm—that’s how it is in New York. The people are generally friendly to a fault, once you get past the brutally direct way they communicate, and the New Yorkers in Florida are a perfect example of that. Most everyone else in the Sunshine State thinks the New York snowbirds are arrogant and loud, but actually, they calm down considerably once the warm sun hits their backs. I’m not saying they instantly become wallflowers or anything—you can take the boy from the Bronx, as they say—but a few weeks in the sun opens them up like a good wine.

  We passed the edifice that was Yankee Stadium. I’d never been, and for reasons I couldn’t fathom Sal was a Mets fan, so it wasn’t exactly Mecca for him, either. We cruised about a block beyond the massive stadium and then the kid crossed onto the wrong side of the road and made to pull into an open spot by the curb. A man was standing in the spot, not appearing to want to cross the road but at the same time not that interested in the sidewalk. The kid hit the horn and the guy slowly glanced at our town car, and then he put his palms up and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, what?

  The kid gestured that he wanted in to the spot, and the guy just raised his shoulders even further, so now they were up around his ears. The kid wound down his window and yelled at the guy.

  “You wanna try the sidewalk there, pal?”

  “I’m standing here, already,” he yelled back, stating the blatantly obvious.

  Now the kid threw his palms in the air, and the guy returned the gesture, as if they were communicating in some urban form of semaphore. Then the guy dropped his hands and took two steps back onto the sidewalk, and the kid pulled the town car into the space.

  The kid opened the door and Sally and I climbed out. The guy who had been standing on the road was now standing on the sidewalk by the town car, not seemingly bothered by it being there but not caring to move any further all the same. I nodded at him and he nodded back, the way people do when they are out hiking in the woods.

  Sal slowly hefted himself out of the car and stood by the guy. “All right?” he asked.

  The guy looked up at the train tracks above.

  “Rain’s coming,” he said. “Traffic’s gonna be a nightmare.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Sal, walking away.

  I followed Sally to a place on the corner. It looked like the kind of low-rent place one found on street corners near ballparks all over the country. It was a sports bar, that much was certain. The kid went back to the car and I glanced across the road. There was a large park opposite, with a baseball diamond in the corner.

  Sal pushed the door open and I followed him in. The place was called Stan’s, and it was the kind of dark place that suits a certain kind of mood. I could imagine it in the summer, when fans flocking to Yankee Stadium might stop off for a drink or two before or after the game. Every inch of wall and ceiling was covered in posters and photographs, flags and pennants. Lots of bars have that kitschy stuff now, faux-authentic memorabilia to create that sporty vibe. This was not that place. Every memory on every wall was the real deal. If Yankee Stadium was a shrine to all that was Yankees baseball, then Stan’s was a shrine to the stadium itself.

  Sal took a seat and I surveyed the room. It wasn’t busy—it was a Monday night in the offseason, after all. A few obvious regulars sat at the bar, watching big screen televisions plastered with people in well-lit studios talking about sports. I never really got the attraction myself. There were a lot of programs based on people talking over the top of each other about sports. I understood the format—they were basically replicating the lively banter that happened in bars around the country. I understood a Yankees fan and a Mets fan going at it, but I really didn’t see the point of two guys in suits yelling and screaming about teams that they didn’t even care about. Who wanted to watch that?

  A woman in a black t-shirt and jeans stopped by our table and we ordered beers, and Sal ordered a Yankee dog, and I took a cheeseburger.

  “This is an old haunt?” I asked Sal.

  “Once upon a time.”

  “They’d have a great spot if they were a block further north.”

  Sal snorted. “Aach. You don’t know where you are, do you?”

  “The Bronx?”

  “You see what’s on the other side of River Av?”

  “A park.”

  “A park. You’re such a heathen.”

  “I was raised a Red Sox fan, so . . .”

  “Exactly my point. That was where the house that Babe built used to stand.”

  “The old Yankee Stadium?”

  “Exactly. Right across the street.”

  “And then they built the new one up the street. But people still come here before games?”

  “Of course. People care about traditions. Owners don’t care and cities don’t care, but people do. It’s like your Bridgeport Bluefish. People are connected to a place through their traditions. Even if they don’t go to the games, it gives them a sense of place. Sending away a team, it’s wrong. It tears apart the fabric of a community. I bet the folks in Bridgeport won’t know what they’ve lost until it’s long gone to North Carolina. See, the Carolinas, those folks know a thing or two about traditions.”

  We sipped our beers and Sal tucked into his hot dog. I left my burger for a while. I was thinking about traditions and how they connected a person to a place, and how stifling that could be.

  “Why’d you leave the Bronx?” I asked Sally.

  He wiped his lip with a napkin. “It happened so long ago I don’t even recall.”

  “You’ve got a memory like a steel trap, Sal.”

  “Aach.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  He looked at me. His face was wrinkled like a walnut. Time had exacted its toll on him.

  “Not so different from you, kid. I had things I wanted to leave behind, and things I wanted to look forward to.”

  “Like?”

  “You know why a guy becomes an engineer?”

  “Because he likes engineering?”

  “Exactly. He likes tinkering with stuff, he likes knowing how things work. So he goes to college and gets a degree in engineering and becomes an engineer. And then what happens?”

  I shrugged and took a bite of my burger.

  “Eventually, if he’s good at his job, he gets promoted or he starts his own business, and then he stops being an engineer and becomes a manager. He stops doing the thing he loved about it and ends up doing something else. Now some guys make that transition just fine, some grow and change and they like what they become. But a lot of guys don’t. They end up spending their days dealing with people issues and accountants and taxes and all that, and then in the evenings they hole up in a shed out the back of their house and tinker with things. They do the thing they love.”

  “You saying you wanted to run a pawn shop in New York but couldn’t?”

  “No, smart guy. I’m saying I had to do things I didn’t want to do. It was expected of me. I did some things, not good things, before I learned that it wasn’t the life I wanted.”

  “How did you end up in Florida?”

 
; “Let’s just say there was some nasty business. A turf war, if you like. People got hurt. One of those people was someone I cared about very much. So I exacted some revenge. Things got out of hand, and I was told to leave town for a while. I knew some people in Florida, so that’s where I went. And then by the time things calmed down, I didn’t have any reason to go back. So I didn’t.”

  He sipped his beer and looked out the window at where Yankee Stadium used to be. I had no idea what he was thinking. His face gave nothing away.

  “Does it feel strange to be back?” I asked.

  “You tell me.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it does. Everything’s familiar but different at the same time. Like it was once mine but it doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

  Sal didn’t take his eyes from the park across the street. “Yeah,” he said. “Tradition embeds a place in you, but it doesn’t stop time. The place moves on without you.”

  He swirled his beer and then took a sip and turned back to me.

  “So your guy, Pickering,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, snapping back into the present. “What did you learn?”

  “He’s in a real pickle.”

  “How bad?”

  “Well, it ain’t Bernie Madoff bad, but it’s bad enough. He’s in the hole for about a million bucks, and his asset list is vaporware.”

  “Vaporware?”

  “As in it doesn’t exist. It’s on paper but nowhere else other than his imagination. He’s tried to get new investors in order to pay off old investors, but none of his investments are actually making money. It looked like he was in a strip mall deal, small potatoes really, that did all right, but then he got into a bigger deal, another mall in White Plains, but Westfield came in and announced a deal close by, and retail is struggling anyway, so his deal collapsed. So he’s been hawking this new thing—a road.”

  “A road?”

  “Yeah, an infrastructure project in Boston. A toll road or some such. But he’s in over his head. The paper trail suggests he has tried to buy his way in—wining and dining and such. There are some big bills coming in from the Bahamas, I don’t know what they are all about, but he tried to buy connections.”

  “Tried?”

  “Let’s just say that the organizations in Boston are well established. As in, two hundred years well established. The Irish control the politicians, the bidding, even the companies that can lay tar and paint lines. All of it. It’s a lucrative business, and they don’t care for interlopers cutting in on their action.”

  “Is he in danger?”

  “Not from the Irish. See, they’ve been doing this for a long time. They know his type, and from what I can see, they’ve just given him enough rope to hang himself.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they let him play his games, spend his money, and then when he’s cash-strapped, they swoop in and clean up.”

  “Okay. But you said he’s not in danger from the Irish. Who is he in danger from?”

  “I’d be more worried about the Kazakhs.”

  “What’re they in for?”

  Sally shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no record of their investment in his books.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. No record means its dark money, and that means your friend is in trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing to link him to them. Which means they have no legal recourse to get their money back. Which means they don’t need any legal recourse. They have other methods. Do you know how much he’s into them for?”

  “He said he borrowed two hundred fifty thousand.”

  “So they’ll be expecting five hundred in return.”

  “That’s daylight robbery.”

  “Almost literally. But that’s called being a lender of last resort. And that five hundred thousand? That makes the math bad. If I had to say, I’d say your man is sunk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t see the money. We can liquidate everything, but it don’t add up to everyone getting paid back. So the way I see it, either your Coach loses, or the Kazakhs lose, but somebody ain’t getting their money. Dead or jail, those are the two best options, and I don’t see jail as helping your Coach.”

  “Why?”

  “Here’s how this works. If you pay back the Kazakhs, then you can’t pay back the other investors, and at least one of them is going to get upset about that. Even if you got their initial investment back, you need to remember that they are expecting a return. Someone will get suspicious, someone will ask questions. And that’s assuming you get the initial sum back, which I don’t see. So I don’t see how the FBI doesn’t get involved. This thing is a Ponzi scheme, open and shut. He’ll go down for it. But once he does, the other investors will never see a penny. The state will appoint an administrator to distribute any leftover cash, but between the state getting their pound of flesh and the administrator’s fees, you’ll be lucky to see a single penny on the dollar.”

  “But if we pay the investors off first, the FBI might not get involved.”

  “Then you won’t have the cash for the Kazakhs. And they’ll go looking for it. They’ll go after him, his family, his dog . . .”

  “None of whom will have anything.”

  “After which they’ll go looking for the people who did get something back.”

  “Like Coach.”

  “Exactly. It’s lose-lose, kid.”

  “We have to try something, Sal. There has to be something.”

  Sal grunted.

  “What?”

  “It’s a long shot. A very long shot.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Kazakhs. I told you, they’re pragmatic people. Maybe we can negotiate.”

  “You think that might work?”

  “No, I don’t. But if they are simply trying to launder money through a more legitimate fund, then they might be interested in a deal.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’ll make a call. We need to meet these Kazakhs and make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  Chapter Twenty

  We didn’t leave the bar but we did switch to soda. Sal made a call and I watched the light dim outside until headlights were the only source of light beneath the elevated train tracks. The city took on another personality at night, and it didn’t exactly have a mardi gras feel to it.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from Ron. A business name and an address in Darien, Connecticut. Darien was a ritzy little village a few miles up the road from Stamford. The business name was AK Holdings, which showed both a massive lack of imagination and a desire to mean nothing to anyone. It was hardly the kind of name that got sung in a jingle on the radio.

  We waited for a guy to arrive. He slipped into a seat beside Sally without a word. He was a large unit, heavyset under a bulky coat, and his eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars. He looked at me as if I were chopped liver, and he really didn’t care for chopped liver.

  “Take a walk,” he said to me. I glanced at Sal.

  “He stays,” said Sal. “He’s involved.”

  “He ain’t involved in our business, Sal.”

  “I can vouch for the kid.”

  The big guy shifted in his seat as if he didn’t like it but could live with it.

  “The family doesn’t want trouble here, Sal.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You should reconsider.”

  “No other option.”

  “These Kazakhs, they don’t play nice, but they do know their place. We don’t want to give them reason to start thinking above their station.”

  “I won’t give them reason. Quite the opposite.”

  “You’re not hearing me, Sally.”

  “Then stop tap dancing around and tell me straight, Joe.”

  “The family won’t back you on this. We don’t want a war and this ain’t your fight.”

  “I don’t plan on fighting, Joe. Just talking.”<
br />
  The big guy, Joe, frowned at me, his eyebrows forming a deep V of mistrust.

  “Is this guy worth it?” he asked Sally, clearly talking about me but not to me. I wanted to say something but kept my mouth shut.

  “Is he, Sal? Is he worth crossing the family?”

  “He is family, Joe.”

  Joe didn’t drop the frown. He just looked at me like he was giving me an MRI.

  “One meet,” he said.

  “One meet,” said Sally.

  “I’ll take you but I ain’t going in.”

  “Fine.”

  “Any trouble is on you.”

  “I’m not looking for trouble, Joe.”

  Joe turned his eye from me and looked at Sally.

  “But is it looking for you?”

  He didn’t let that thought linger. He pushed back from the table and stood and walked out of the bar. Sally pushed himself up slowly and I took care of the check, and then I followed him out onto the street. It was colder, and a light rain was drifting down, just enough to make the roads slick.

  The town car was waiting by the curb, still facing against traffic. The driver got out and opened the door for Sally and by default for me. Big Joe strode around the hood and got in the passenger’s seat. Then the kid got in behind the wheel and pulled a wide U-turn that took us back to the north, to the sound of blasting horns.

  We drove for about an hour on the freeway, the rain visible in the headlights and taillights and in the sound the tires made on the blacktop. The car felt like a cocoon, safe from the rain and the traffic, but the silence sucked away any good feelings. The further we got into Connecticut, the heavier the rain came down.

  We passed the exit for downtown Stamford and for a moment I thought we might be headed for the address in Darien, but then we pulled off at Hope Street. The traffic in Stamford was heavy and the going was slow. It gave me plenty of time to think, which wasn’t the best thing given the thoughts that were rolling around in my head. Eventually the town car made its way up to Springdale. We passed the train station and then Joe told the driver to cross the tracks. Thoughts of the wrong side of the tracks passed through my mind, but I kept those thoughts to myself. We cruised down a dark street lined with warehouses. Some bore large signs telling of furniture sales or truck rentals, while others told no tales about what went on within.