The Killing of the Saints

by Alex Abella

  prologue

  O yeme, chico, ven acá, what's this, this big story I hear you're doing about the Cubans and the Marielitos in Los Angeles? Coño, chico, you know that the Cubans are always the top, brother, nobody smarter or sexier or better looking, you know? Look at what we did here in Miami, it was just a swamp for niggers and dying Jews before we moved in. We turned it into the capital of Latin American enterprise, the center of all the movement of business and peoples who want to be free and shop at Burdines and have a nice condo on the beach, or a house in Coral Gables and drive a late-model car. Qué va, brother, if not for us Miami would be nothing, just another sand barrier at the edge of a mangrove full off lying roaches and good for nothings. Everybody should do the same thing we did down here, mi hermano. But I'll tell you something, you know what? They don't have the brains or the balls to do what we did, to take a load of anger and resentment and turn it into concrete and gold, to let your desire point the way so that in the end the whole world is yours because you want it and that's it, you know? That's why we're better, that's why we're one of a kind, unicos. Lookit, if all the Mexicans in L.A. got together, brother, let me tell you, those Anglos would be fucked, man, that's what. Nothing can resist the will of a people whose time has come. It's a force of nature, like the wind, the tides, which are nothing, air and water, but if put together and driven by a will become a hurricane or a tidal wave that wreaks the vengeance long denied. But you know what? It's not gonna happen because there's nobody like the Cubans. Just look at the music, the jazz music, man, that's all Cuban and that's a fact. All these guys came down to Havana and drank our rum and fooled around with the ladies and got into the music and pretty soon, brother, they'd stolen all the good notes from us. Even rock 'n' roll, mi hermano. You don't believe me? Dig this, you know how important Bo Diddley was, right? You know, the dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dum-dum beat of his, the one that spread through rock 'n' roll and made it so great? Hey, he himself admits he stole that from a Cuban song he heard. You see, you know, the beat, el sabor, that Cuban thing, like the pussy of a nice Cuban girl, mi hermano, incomparable. All these guys come and steal from us and then they claim it as their own. But that's OK, too, that's the past. No need to start worrying about that. You still don't believe we're the greatest? OK, look at sports-the greatest boxer, the smartest, the one that taught Sugar Ray Robinson all he knew, who was that? Why that was Kid Chocolate, my brother. And don't forget Kid Gavilan and Benny Kid Pareto And baseball-well, let's not even start with baseball, I can't begin to tell you the names of all the Cuban greats-Aparicio, Marichal, all the others. And José Canseco, qué va, there's nothing like a Cuban. You know, for such a little country, we're the greatest, that's why they call us the Jews of Latin America. We're the brains of everything south of the border. And north, too, it's just that we haven't been here all that long. Lookit, we're the fastest immigrant group to assimilate in the history of this country. Coño, man, more than the Jews even. We have professors, artists, engineers, reporters, dancers, musicians, fashion designers, businessmen-check out the biggest company in the world, Coca-Cola, who doesn't know Coke, right? I mean the drinking kind, mi hermano, although Cubans are also in the other stuff too. Who's the head of Coca-Cola? Un cubano. Who else? We know the stuff Like I said, look at Miami. Our problem was that we always had this whole political thing behind us, you know, tying us down and keeping us really all blind to the realities of what we could be. That's why we've only flowered here, on this stupid, double-crossing, treacherous, perfidious American soil where everything is possible but where we see every day how we were betrayed when we tried to stomp out the bloody Nero with the cigar and the smile full of bullets and bones. But, hey, that's historia antigua. So then who cares about these Marielitos who came here expecting everything to be done for them, thinking this is socialism or something, that all they have to do is ask and it shall be given, knock and the door will open. Coño, man, these guys just don't want to break their backs, work their asses off like we did. They want everything just because they have a pretty face, you know? So all they do is complain about this and that and then pick up a pistola and think they can solve all their problems by pumping people full of bullets. I mean, most of them are just a bunch of niggers, brother, so don't go around bothering too much with them. They give us white Cubans a bad name, you know, muy mala reputación. It was that son of a bitch Fidel who fucked the Americans up the ass and us too. That scum, those human dregs he sent us, he got them out of Mazorra, out of the madhouse, and out of the prisons he got them. They're shit, man, they're not worth spit and you shouldn't worry about them. Just look at the great thing we've done, brother, look at Miami. And that's nothing, just you wait. Pretty soon we're gonna have Cuban congressmen and senators from all over the place, you wait and see. We already had a Cuban governor in Florida and what's her name, that congresswoman from Dade. Shit, man, they might even change the Constitution for us, brother. Make a Cuban born in Havana president of these U.S. of A., won't that be something! So forget about these Marielitos, brother, forget about them, they're scum, they're nothing. They're shit, mierda. Fidel should have killed them all anyhow. That's what they deserve, the firing wall, el paredón.

  1

  In Los Angeles, cold weather is like death-it catches people by surprise, leaving them yearning for the warmth of the past. The day when two Cuban exiles carried out one of the bloodiest robberies in Southern California history was an even greater occasion for regret than most Southland winter spells. When the day broke, temperatures plummeted, forcing everyone in this coastal Gilead to pull the woollies out from under the pile of baggies, tank tops and folded sweats. Actual honest-to-goodness breaths of condensed air hung all day in front of people's mouths like word balloons in cartoons, and old aches and pains left behind after crossing the Tehachapis and the Arizona state line surfaced like old cracks in the foundation of the house. Home consumption of oatmeal and grits rose while restaurants and coffeehouses throughout the basin churned out hearty feasts of eggs, bacon, sausages, fries, double portions of cream and butter on everything, cholesterol and slim figure be damned. Those who had fireplaces lit them and kept them stoked for as long as they could, while the few foreseeing Angelenos ingested massive quantities of vitamin C to forestall the colds and flu that would come in the wake of the frigid snap as surely as the city sewers overflow into Santa Monica Bay after every storm.

  The men who would carry out the carnage at Schnitzer Jewelers, José Pimienta and Ramón Valdez, however, were barely aware of the chill that descended on the city. They had spent the entire night praying to Oggún, the mighty warrior of the santería cult, asking for his help, his strength and his daring in the heroic deed they were about to carry out. Redolent of sweet basil, jasmine and frankincense, their three-rooms-and-a-bath apartment was a perfumed steam box of fatigue, fear and desire, hard by the building that once housed Aimee Semple McPherson's Universal Church of Faith in Echo Park. Even if they had opened the paint-encrusted windows to let in some air, the men would have been incapable of smelling the tortillas, burritos and menudo of their Mexican neighbors. Their sustenance throughout the night-coffee, cigars and a large mound of powder cocaine laced with methamphetamine-had rendered their senses useless. For twelve hours they knelt before the altar where they had arrayed the instruments of their devotion-.357 Magnum, .45 Colt automatic, sawed-off Browning shotgun with retractable butt, black Sten machine pistol, gray Uzi sub-machine gun, six sticks of dynamite, two grenades. Finally, at nine, the two men stripped, rubbed their bodies with oil, dressed all in white-underwear, shoes, socks, pants, shirt, coat and overcoat- hid their armory in the folds of their clothing and stepped out for the sacred mission at hand. In their absence, from
the altar's lit candles, a tissue caught fire. The smoke alarm went off but no one paid attention until the entire apartment was engulfed in flames and the local fire fighters hacked down the front door with their axes. They found, amid the burnt offerings, several beheaded chickens, a quartered dog and charred bones that looked suspiciously like human remains.

  The man who owned the site where José and Ramón conducted their hecatomb also said his morning prayers that winter's day. Barry Schnitzer had woken before dawn, draped his prayer shawl over his stooped shoulders, set the threadbare yarmulke on the crown of his head and intoned the Jewish prayer for the dead. Rising early was something that had always come easily for him, from the time he was a cobbler's apprentice in a small village in Galicia, when he was known as Levi Abronowitz. It was also what had saved him from the camps. Alone among the carload taking his people to Auschwitz, he was awake as the rotted floorboard in the freight train fell to the tracks, leaving a hole no wider than his shoulders. Without a moment's hesitation, before anyone else in the car realized what miracle of escape yawned before them, Levi dove for the opening. He squeezed through somehow, hanging from the underside of the car like a roach from a dining table. The board hit the track and, bouncing up, was caught in the gears, jamming the wheels. The train jolted to a halt. Levi was thrown to the ground, his head slamming against the dew-sprinkled crossbars in the roadway. He passed out briefly but his drive to live brought him to within seconds. He slipped through an opening next to the metal wheels, so hot that they raised blisters on his hands and knees. By the time the gates of the guards' car slammed open, Levi was already on the far side of the tracks, a small ragged man running for shelter in the grove of tall pines by the roadway. It would be hours before the rays of a slate gray sun would halfheartedly pierce the fog-enshrouded countryside. By then Levi would be hiding in a damp culvert, shivering from the cold but miles away from the railway of death, free to somehow find his way to his uncle in America.

  Even after changing his name, marrying twice and making a fortune, the memory of that narrow escape seized him every morning like a stiff rheumatic joint to be warmed and flexed before using. No matter how high he rose he harbored that memory as a reminder that for some unknown reason God had picked him out, and not eight million others, to survive. Because of that, Schnitzer always felt an affinity for refugees, Jewish or not, feeling that from a wide perspective (and how could it not be wide, considering how narrow his escape had been?) everyone in the West is a displaced person, that somewhere in our persons we all wear the yellow Star of David. This affinity led him to hire, after he advertised for an assistant manager for the jewelry store he inherited at the Mart on Sixth and Hill, the dusky, sloe-eyed Armenian girl whose bright intelligence cut through her awkward English.

  Hilda Sarkissian was twenty-five at the time, with a little girl and a shiftless husband who used to beat her, but she had worked out just fine for Schnitzer. Under his careful direction and using her Middle Eastern contacts-with her fluent Armenian, Iranian, Turkish and Arabic-Schnitzer's business grew until there were a dozen Schnitzer's Jewelers throughout the Southland, all geared to satisfying the little guy, the modest customer, the fry cook or office clerk who'd take home a pair of diamond studs and pay them off at ten dollars a week for years until at the end he'd actually paid enough to buy himself a whole necklace. Levi, who had gotten into the jewelry business without knowing anything about it after his wife's father had died, leaving the store and a name Levi informally adopted as his own, this son of a peddler without knowledge or skills, congratulated himself on his foresight at having hired his enterprising helper.

  In the course of business both Hilda and Levi grew rich, moving away from Boyle Heights, the old East Los Angeles ghetto now filled with assorted Hispanics, to Northridge and Bel Air, respectively. Schnitzer had relinquished day-to-day control of the store to her a long time ago, but twice a week, almost ceremonially, he would drive down in his maroon Lincoln Continental to the flagship store at Sixth and Hill, to the shop that had made his fortune.

  That morning in Northridge, Hilda Sarkissian's biggest problem was the same it had been for the last sixteen years, her daughter, Jeannie. Hilda had made an appointment at a local mental health

  clinic to treat her daughter's ever increasing weight problem, and now she had to convince Jeannie to let herself be interviewed, measured and analyzed in the pursuit of sleekness. As Hilda grabbed the keys to the Mercedes from the silver tray in the foyer, she heard the water running and imagined the clouds of steam filling her daughter's baby blue bathroom. She hesitated a moment, debating whether to knock at the door and demand that Jeannie come out, then decided to delay confronting Jeannie until dinner that night, when, after baklava and Turkish coffee, they could talk like ladies and maybe that stupid girl would get some sense in her at last.

  Hilda walked out of the ample Spanish-style home with the red tile roof and the fancy windows looking out on a quarter acre of azaleas, roses and green, green lawn. She waved at Dolores, the Salvadoran housekeeper, whose battered Datsun pulled into the driveway as Hilda pointed the nose of her Mercedes down the steep sloping street to the on-ramp of the crowded 118 Freeway. She glanced at the dashboard clock and her businesswoman's impatience surged forth. Leaning on her horn, she zigzagged between lanes, trying to hurry downtown to the jewelry shop before old man Schnitzer arrived.

  While Hilda was maneuvering her way, her shop manager, Carlos Azevedo, was already removing the padlock and opening the concertina gate to Schnitzer's flagship store. He sniffed disdainfully at the reek of urine left by a vagrant, intent, as blindly as a dog or a cat, on marking off his territory. Born in East Los Angeles, among the soot-covered casuarinas of Montebello, Azevedo had nothing but contempt for the dozens of glassy-eyed, able-bodied men he saw panhandling every day in and around Pershing Square. The first time he heard TV commentators and newspapers referring to them as homeless people, he bristled. Pinche homeless, he thought, they're either crazy or bums. Homeless were my people. These guys just don't want to work, they deal dope and drink Thunderbird and steal ladies' purses, then go teary eyed and say society made them what they are. Chingaderas. I tell you, if I was the mayor, I'd put them all to work, digging ditches or cleaning the freeway, if not to the pinche cárcel, I wouldn't care, just get them off the streets. Azevedo turned off the alarm and let himself into the store.

  Minutes later, over in Echo Park, José and Ramón left their apartment, the fragrance of their body lotion lingering in the narrow hallway of their building. The cold sun bit into their dilated pupils, giving objects a hard cutting edge-the Spanish language signs for doctors' offices, the tile roof of the Pioneer market, the low-riding De Soto waiting for them at the corner. José turned to Ramón and made the only comment to be heard until they entered the store.

  "It looks like Havana in the winter."

  "Yes, but it's colder. Vamos, it's late."

  The De Soto that José and Ramón used to get to the jewelry store was a lumbering behemoth from 1949, a loan from the owner of a body shop, a fellow Cuban named Inocente Gonzalez. When police contacted him after the grisly events, the portly budding capitalist rolled his baby blue eyes and said he had no idea José and Ramón had such a thing in mind. Police were skeptical but had no choice except to believe him when he said they told him they wanted to go to Disneyland and didn't have a car, so Gonzalez lent them the De Soto, which he had seized on a mechanic's lien after the owner skipped to Mexico fleeing arson charges. The De Soto had been outfitted with special low-rider springs, said Gonzalez, and Ramón had experienced some problems navigating it through town.

  The LAPD detectives, with their usual sagacity, surmised that unfamiliarity was the reason why the De Soto was scraping the pavement as it negotiated the entrance to the parking lot next to Schnitzer's. Eyewitnesses said the car made quite a sight, its sky blue aerodynamic hood and fenders and shiny chrome torpedo bumpers muscling through downtown rush hour traffic, as conspicuous as a
Whittier Boulevard cholo strutting down Hill in flying colors with his ruca on his arm.

  The parking attendant, Remigio Flores, a veteran of the rumbles in Frogtown and San Fernando, was shocked when the undercarriage of the car hit the slant of the driveway, throwing off sparks. Remigio meant to tell the driver to raise the suspension the next time, but he changed his mind when he saw the icy expression on the faces of José and Ramón after they got out and ordered him to keep the car running and up front by the exit, that they wouldn't take long. Remigio kept an eye on the pair and when he saw them entering the Schnitzer store, he knew without a doubt that soon he'd be hearing the whistling of bullets. So he did as he was told, parked the car up front and went inside his shack, his hand on the sawed-off shotgun he kept in a corner for protection.

  The actual size of the flagship Schnitzer Jewelers store was relatively small, considering the volume of sales handled by Carlos and Hilda. On a 2,500-square-foot location, the establishment racked up sales of more than six million dollars a year, an astonishing amount, for practically all the items were under a thousand dollars in value.

  In spite of the high volume of sales, especially around lunchtime, when the swelling crowds of typists, clerks and secretaries descended on Pershing Square, the store had never felt the need for more than one security guard. The man was named Gene Hawkins. Tall, rangy and black, he was also known as "Star" because he had the same name as a San Francisco 49ers football player. But where the gridiron ace was light and agile, Schnitzer's Hawkins tended toward reflection and deliberation. Chilled by the long drive from Compton in his Citation, with a heater that had broken down two months before, Gene had gone to the back of the store to fix himself a cup of instant oatmeal. There was only one customer in the store at the time, an elderly Asian woman with a small child, carefully surveying the filigree earrings on the velvet case.