South by South Bronx

by Abraham Rodriguez

  “I’m going to head up to Kennedy Airport and bring the guy downtown,” Myers said. “Maybe we can talk to him.” As if Santo Romas would need a translator.

  “Okay,” I said, surrendering to some overpowering flow, an inevitable energy. Somehow I felt I was pursuing myself, across tenement rooftops, waiting patiently parked down the street. Those stones hitting my back window. There was a famous dictator who said it once. What really happened doesn’t matter. What counts is winning. After that, the winner can tell the story whichever way is better.

  I was saying that. It was almost a prayer.

  12.

  She was a dancer.

  Leni Riefenstahl

  was born in 1902, in the Wedding district of Berlin. Her mother dreamed of having a daughter who would become a famous actress. One day Leni went to a film audition and happened to stroll by the open door of a dance studio. She was enthralled, signed up for lessons. Convinced her mother that this was what she was born to do. Soon she was doing recitals and getting rave reviews in Berlin newspapers. She might have stayed a dancer if not for a film she saw called The Mountain of Destiny. She was so enthralled that she hunted down the director and told him that starring in his next film was what she was born to do. It is not really clear what she did to the director, but not only did she star in his next film, The Holy Mountain, it was also dedicated To the dancer, Leni Riefenstahl.

  Leni danced her way through a couple more films, though now she had become convinced that filmmaking was what she had been born to do. She decided to shoot her own film, wrote a script called The Blue Light, and after many hardships managed to shoot it. The picture opened to mostly favorable reviews, but the experience was disenchanting. Filmmaking is expensive, and it wasn’t easy getting sophisticated Berlin producers to finance her kitschy ideas about mountains and naked nature girls doing dances by shimmering moonlit lakes. If directing was a man’s world, then maybe it was time for a new world order. When she went to hear Adolf Hitler speak in February 1932, she was enthralled and wrote him a postcard begging to meet him. Just so happened that Hitler had already noticed her doing that nature dance by a shimmery moonlit lake in The Blue Light. He offered her a job he knew she was born to do, complete with the promise of an unlimited budget, unlimited access, and enough film to give her imagination free reign.

  It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

  Leni Riefenstahl insists to this day that she was forced into making films for the Nazis, but it is very likely she saw Hitler as that big producer she could charm into doing her bidding. She was carving a path through terrain just like the short guy with the mustache.

  Was remembering so hard? Was telling the truth such a chore?

  She stepped out on the fire escape.

  The gun was in her hand.

  She went down the steps slowly, knees trembly weak. She gave the bed a last look, where she had left him.

  He was not moving.

  He lay like sleeping. It brought a strange guilt. She knew he had been drinking, that coming back to consciousness would always be slow. She hadn’t killed him. She hadn’t hit him so hard. She hadn’t. She had gone out the window and turned back. She watched him as he lay sleeping. Like she did the first time she came.

  He knew nothing.

  She righted the chair that had fallen over in the kitchen. Swept up the sugar cubes, wiped away the spilled milk. Put the roll of tape back under the sink. She decided not to tie him up. She would not come back, but rather jump into the next square and hope for more open doors. And yet leaving, and leaving him there lying like that. A churning disquiet.

  “I was a bad dream,” she said into his ear. “I never happened.”

  Now going down those fire escape steps.

  “I never happened,” she said. “I was never here.”

  Like using an eraser. Like taking it back. A record was skipping. A record was stuck.

  She was a model.

  Anne Sexton

  was born in 1928 and lived all her life in the Boston area. Princeton, Newton, Weston, Cambridge. Roxbury—clatter of the T across cobbled streets to the Harvard Square station. The pictures, so many pictures. A dark-eyed beauty posing like Rita Hayworth, like a ’40s sex kitty with big smoldering eyes born to stun to startle to take prisoners.

  She carried a bulging portfolio of snaps, but modeling fell from her like dead skin. She got married instead, in 1948. To start out as one thing and become another. The search for definition, for a definition one can live with. You become something until it doesn’t become you anymore.

  Anne Sexton became a poet. Wife, mother of two, she tried to kill herself and in a mental hospital discovered she could write. Drumming out lines passionate strange. Poetry did not save her from suicide but it did save her long enough for her to write eight books. She had dark ghosts following her, but when she wrote, she was as courageous as ARMY WAR HEROES. She blew houses down with cluster bombs of words, with images that stuck in the mind like thumbtacks. She wrote about crimes that dropped on her as if from a high building. The poem was “The Legend of the One-Eyed Man.” The titles of her books seemed to reflect the struggle between staying alive or popping the escape hatch. By her last book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, it sounded like she had made up her mind.

  She carefully snuck past the windows on the lower floor. Street sounds. Buses stop and go. That kid going, Yo Ritchie! and the scrape of the piraguero’s shaver against the block of ice. Down another flight. As she reached the window, she squatted. She strained to hear, pressed against sharp brick.

  The window was open a little from the bottom. The blinds were drawn but the slats were slanted to let sun in. She could see inside, past the wispy smoke of thin lace curtains.

  The room was large. There was a bed, a bureau, a small table. An expanse of floor covered in shiny red linoleum. She recalled the candlelight, the Mexican girl’s fringed dress. The CD player sat on the bureau like a fat silver bullet.

  The gun was in her hand.

  Women are born twice, Anne Sexton wrote.

  She was an actress.

  Marlene Dietrich

  was born in 1901 in Schöneburg, a district of Berlin. She was a spoiled young blonde, attracted to the theater. Her mother packed her off to study music instead in Weimar, the home of Goethe. Marlene soon tired of the violin and returned to Berlin, to sign up at the Max Reinhardt School to study acting. She appeared in plays and, in 1923, her first movie. In most cases, she was just the pretty blonde with the legs. By 1928 she had appeared in thirteen films, was married five years, and had a four-year-old daughter. She was nearing thirty by the time Josef von Sternberg cast her as his “Lola” in The Blue Angel. Her career had run its course in Berlin. No one seemed willing to give her a contract, so she took Sternberg up on his offer and went with him to Hollywood. They made seven films together, Marlene crafting the look while Sternberg handled the camera, the lighting. Marlene would never look more beautiful than she did through Sternberg’s eyes. They both created a presence mightier than substance, a huge glamour myth that destroyed any semblance of reality. She would forever treasure those films, love notes from a man entranced, a man she could work together with. She saw them as fine art, beautifully crafted paintings, no matter how trite, no matter how slight. After Sternberg, she made countless films, throwaway pictures, legs, a face, a smoldering cigarette. She was under contract, a working actress going where the jobs were. “I sell glamour just as another sells fish or shoelaces,” she said. Too much praise made her grumpy. It was nothing special.

  While she was working in Hollywood, the Nazis took Berlin. (They would eventually take Paris, the other city she loved.) Marlene was not enthralled by Hitler. She had no illusions about what he represented. The Nazis courted her, offering her vast sums of money if she would return to Germany, renounce Jew Hollywood, and become a true Aryan again. She made what she later called “the only decision possible,” even though her mother and older sister insisted on remaining in Ber
lin. While Leni Riefenstahl shot her films glorifying the Nazis, Marlene became a United States citizen. When the war came, she went to work for the USO, singing and entertaining American troops. The only way to beat the Nazis was from the outside. It must be painful to live abroad while your hometown gets bombed into the Stone Age.

  The war wrenched Berlin away from her. It took her mother six months after its end. By the time she returned to Germany fifteen years later, she had remade herself from glamourous actress to glamourous chanteuse, living off old glory like a veteran wearing medals. She loved singing those old sentimental Berlin songs, but when she came back to Germany to sing them, there were protests and stink bombs. Some people hated her for leaving. Some people hated her for coming back. She never returned again, feeling spurned. She settled in Paris, and died there. She wrote her memoir, Thank God I Am a Berliner, in French. She sang her love songs to the city from afar, from Paris New York Rio de Janiero Moscow and Warsaw, where she walked to the monument and laid flowers for the dead. She fought for her country. She turned her back on her country. She fought for her country by turning her back on her country.

  Safety off. Creaky floor. Moved past toilet, tiny frosted window asparkle with sun. Goofy flowered shower curtain. The living room canyoned out after that. Cushy furniture, thick curtains. Entertainment center—stereo TV speakers a wall of CDs a shelf of ceramic knick-knacks froggies carrying Puerto Rican flags an ashtray that said BIENVENIDO A LA ISLA DEL ENCANTO—“I thought I might see you again,” he said, not even flinching.

  Not a line on his face moved, so stone clear-eyed as he sat there at the kitchen table. Blazing cigarette tip. Like he was expecting her. Stared at her and not the gun, as if it wasn’t there. As if you can ignore a gun if a woman is holding it.

  “I was hoping it wasn’t you, though. I was hoping it was someone else.” His voice calm steady. Thin blue plume of smoke up. “Because if you were someone else, I would have dropped you.”

  The eye patch gave his face a sullen, frozen-stiff feel. A statue talking, the way he sat so bolt upright. He moved only to bring cigarette to lips, to tap ash into Puerto Rican ceramic. Pictures of palm trees, a beach. Those fucking tree frogs.

  “I would’ve dropped you when you stopped in the bathroom to check out the goofy flowered shower curtain.”

  A blur of movement. Subtle enough she saw the gun. Almost invisible so steel-black against black matador pants. In his lap, no sudden move. He had the drop on her; she had the drop on him. He exhaled like he detested such scenes.

  “You should put the gun away,” he said.

  She did not take her eyes off the gun in his lap, the hand lying casually beside it on his thigh. Her arms aching, a rubber band about to snap, and she couldn’t be sure about not squeezing the trigger. A sneeze would do it, a pinkie flick.

  The coffee pot started gurgling. What is it with Puerto Ricans and coffee? It pissed her off to hold the gun in a stance like that while he seemed so remote and untouched by threat. The angle he tilted his head to keep her in sight of his one eye reminded her of a caged panther staring back. He turned his face a little to receive cigarette to lips. A slow, thin puff. I have remembered much about Judas.

  She shook off the intruding Anne.

  The kitchen was not large. From his spot at the table, he pulled coffee off flame. A simple movement. She almost shot him. The way he poured coffee into his cup a challenge, an affront. He was daring her to shoot him, or he just didn’t believe she could. Puerto Ricans must be well accustomed to having strangers stroll through their houses. He took another puff, still waiting for her to tell him. She would not lower the gun. His did not shift from where it sat on his thigh, on its side with his hand by it so snug. “The gun kept going off,” she could tell the judge.

  The phone started ringing. He didn’t move a muscle.

  “Don’t you answer your phone?”

  That was her first question to him.

  “I have voice mail,” he said.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  She watched the limp gunhand. Not necessarily unvigilant. With his other hand he deposited his cigarette in the CAGUAS, CITY OF DREAMS ashtray, then took another hit of coffee. He always seemed aware of her even when he wasn’t directly looking at her. He reclaimed his cigarette from the ashtray’s slotted holder and took another puff.

  “So, what are you?” He picked flakes of tobacco off his lips. “ATF? FBI? Some kind of narc?”

  She was thinking: I’m going to have to shoot him.

  “I figured you were something like that the first time I saw you with David. He’s that kind of people. Attracts cops. Like flies to shit.”

  “I’m not,” she said. The other words wouldn’t come out.

  “David draws bad luck like a magnet. He’s not the kind of person who should involve himself in underhanded things. I told Tony. We all had a good thing going, man.”

  He was nodding like nothing could be plainer. The word flow seemed to psych him up, a wrestler pumping himself up before the big lift.

  “What I’m telling you is, I voted no. I wanted nothing to do with it. You know that. Are you wired?” He seemed to lose patience. “Just what the hell do you want?”

  “David’s dead,” she said.

  It was a thin crack, cutting through stone. A semblance of crease, flinch. Cigarette hand moving hypnotic slow, close to lips, no puff, close to lips. Something sagged, she could feel it. Her gun retracted slightly, slowly, unconsciously, as the reality of the phrase sank in. David’s dead. Final, blank. She was blinking fast. He took a good deep draw. A semblance of rock-hard, restored.

  “I just heard about Tony. Two days I been sitting here, waiting for the other shoe to drop. You sure he’s dead?”

  It shook her. The images that came in waves. The gun was a useless dead weight.

  “I just came from there,” she said.

  The phone started ringing again.

  “Did anybody see you come here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Were you followed?”

  “I said no.”

  “Did you come straight here from there?”

  “No!”

  The questions shot out fast, as if he were ashamed to ask. The phone stopped ringing—a sudden silence, an elevator drop. He stubbed the cigarette out and, in the same motion, placed his gun on the table by his coffee. A desolate emptiness passed over his face like a shadow.

  “What happened?”

  The burning dizzy. The hateful need to use words. She decided fast: David had trusted him. She exhaled, sank into a chair. Her eyes—she blinked fast, wiped clumsy, not wanting to look at him.

  One-Eye reached into a nearby cabinet. The bottle of rum looked warm, worn like old leather. The two shot glasses clinked in his hand. He poured rum into both, made a vague toasting gesture, and took his shot. Slammed his glass on the table CLACK.

  “They figured out it was at his house,” she said. “I was there when they came.”

  The shot of rum was a flaming breath, a deep kiss that left a gratifying tremor.

  “They were stupid enough to call and leave a message. They said they had Tony, and he was dead unless he gave them what they wanted.”

  “Did he? Give them what they want?”

  “No.” The air went out of the room. “He gave it to me.”

  “To you?”

  One-Eye rubbed his face with his hand, trying to blot out, stamp out, somehow erase.

  “And it, it … what the fuck is ‘it’?”

  He got up from the table. The kitchen was too small for him to pace. He ended up against the counter, staring at the light brown wood grain.

  “At David’s house. I wouldn’t have expected that. David always played the law-abiding citizen, always helping out his crooked little brother. And yet he was the one that pushed Tony into it. Tony loved that I-spy shit. He liked the underground. Magic keys, special codes. Safe-deposit boxes. An intricate pickup and delivery. Tony has a million
cousins.” He poured his next shot, standing. “I’ll bet you ten million dollars that what you have is a key. A small key, maybe to a locker in a train station or a safe-deposit box.”

  She didn’t say anything. One-Eye stared at her like he had already gotten his answer.

  “So you ended up with the hot potato.” He lit the next cigarette with a quick desultory motion. Dragged for all it was worth. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Not let them get it,” she said.

  “Shit. They’re going to think you have it anyway when they don’t find it. And here, you had to come here!?”

  “It was another promise I made David.”

  “To come to me? What for? I wasn’t in it. I said no. I’m the only one they asked. Wiggie, Jaco, Quique, they don’t know shit. I can imagine how they’ll feel when they find out. The two brothers decided to pull a heist and run off, hit it big and disappear. Leave the organization holding the bag. Because that’s what’s going to happen. You know that. Once those two vanished with the dough, the cops would swoop down on us. It’s the end of everything, a cheap-ass sellout of the organization. I told them I’d rather go it alone, just do a fade-out and start someplace else. I just wasn’t into it.”

  “David told me if things went wrong I should come to you. He said you were the only person outside of Tony that he completely trusted.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m not into it.”

  “It was why he wanted me to meet you, that one time when we … when he picked up the ID cards.”

  She remembered how uptight One-Eye had been when she and David went to meet him one Saturday almost a month before. They had walked up the hill in St. Mary’s Park, bought coquitos, sat by the running track behind the projects. David told him she was absolutely IN.

  “Well, I’m absolutely NOT,” One-Eye had said. “Just don’t mix me up in it.” He’d handed over the cards so David could check them out. There was a work ID and a driver’s license. Both had his face. Both had a fake name. How could One-Eye think he wasn’t involved?