The others at the table looked to Michael as if asking him to deal with this. Michael tried. He said his friend meant nothing by it and this is scaring the girls. Give us a break, let us finish our pizza and leave. He asked if he could buy them a beer. The drunker of the two jabbed a finger against Michael's chest and leaned close to his face.
”I live here, faggot,” he said. “You don't come to my town and tell me what to do.” The other spit beer on Michael's shoes.
The two other students kicked back their chairs. They asked Michael if he needed any help. He saw in their eyes that they hoped he'd say no. The owner stepped from behind the counter with a wooden mallet in his hand. “Sit down,” he said, “or take it outside.” Michael asked everyone to relax. He suggested that just he and the factory workers step into the parking lot and see if they can't settle this peacefully.
He had both men down, and unable to continue, within less than a minute. But the owner had called the police. All three were arrested, charged with disturbing the peace, and one had to be hospitalized for a possible ruptured spleen. Michael was also charged with battery.
He might well have been expelled had not his Uncle Jake called in a favor from a congressman who had close ties with Father Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame. All charges were subsequently dropped.
Soon afterward, he flew home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Moon met his flight at La Guardia Airport. They took the shuttle bus to the far end of the long-term parking lot. The sun had set. Michael asked him why he parked so far away. Moon watched the bus drive off, then knocked him to the ground.
He waited for Michael's head to clear. He said that Big Jake had not asked him to do this. It was his own idea. He had decided that Michael was in need of a lesson.
Michael got up off the ground twice. The third time, he could not. As he tried to catch his breath—his face unmarked, however—Moon patiently repeated what he thought he'd made clear earlier.
”I taught you to handle yourself,” he said, “so you wouldn't get hurt. It wasn't so you could bust up some klepto over a damned typewriter.”
“Moon ... he took more than that . . . from a lot of scared kids.”
“Yeah, but you didn't know that then. I also didn't teach you so you could take out two pieces of redneck shit who hate you for gettin' what they'll never have. What's rule one, Michael?''
“Walk away. Try to walk away.”
“Did you?”
“Moon, I tried.”
“Not hard enough. What's rule two?”
“Never ask anyone to step outside.”
“That's rule three. Rule two is no Lone Ranger crap if you can help it. Way I heard, there was people in the pizza place who would have backed you.”
Michael hesitated, then nodded.
“But you wanted to show off. Wanted them coeds to see what a tough grown-up man Michael Fallon is.”
Fallon grimaced. “It ... wasn't that.”
Moon ignored the denial. “So now the whole school knows. Is that good or bad, Michael?”
“Moon ... I know. It was stupid.”
“Next guy you cross,” Moon told him, “he's gonna say, ‘That Fallon’ s one tough son of a bitch. Got all these moves. Maybe I better get me a billy club, maybe a gun, come up behind him.’ You want people thinkin' like that, Michael?”
“No.”
“When you say to some dude, ‘Let's step outside,’ he knows you don't want to dance. He has any sense, he'll lay a bottle over your head right then and there.”
Michael said nothing.
“Even if he don't, you just gave away your edge and, Mikey, you ain't good enough to do that. What you're good enough for is to push most people around. That one of your goals in life?”
“Moon ... for Pete's sake. That's two fights since I was twelve years old. I'm not a bully.”
“See you don't turn into one, Michael. See you don't start to like it.”
He already didn't like it.
He wished Moon had never taught him all those things. Anyway, what was the point of learning them if he was going to get hammered by Moon every time he put them to use?
Still, he knew that Moon was right. “If you have to do it,” Moon always said, “do it quick, do it private, and then walk away. Don't get a reputation. They take forever to shake. And the surest way to get dead, in jail, or hit from behind is to have a reputation.”
It's also the surest way to have no close friends. He'd learned, over the past few months, that notoriety was one thing and popularity was another. It seemed as if every classmate he liked, or wanted to like, was suddenly keeping his or her distance. Those he did attract always seemed, well, damaged in some way.
Especially the girls. A couple of them, who had paid no special notice before, now found him exciting. They said so, straight out. He could have taken them to bed in a minute. He didn't for two reasons. First, they struck him as the kind of girls who would have joined the Manson family. The second reason was more honest. He was afraid to even try. They might have laughed at him.
To hear all his male classmates talk, Michael Fallon had to be the only virgin in the entire freshman class at Notre Dame. It was the one area of his education that both Moon and Uncle Jake had neglected. Growing up Catholic didn't make it any easier. When you grow up Catholic, with all that emphasis on impure thoughts and monkish morals, you end up feeling that robbery, arson, and even murder must be lesser mortal sins than sex before marriage. That, right there, he had often thought, probably explains the Mafia.
In time, his notoriety faded. But Moon was right. It never quite went away, even though he never had another fight during his four years at Notre Dame. Unless you'd count two bench-clearing brawls during football games. But those were fun and essentially harmless. You couldn't get hurt unless you were dumb enough to pull off your helmet or to throw a punch at a face mask.
Yes, he'd gone out for the team because Uncle Jake was right. Everyone always asked. He made it as a walk-on in his sophomore year. He was never a starter but he did make the traveling squad. Played in almost every game. Not for long, but he played.
He had also joined the karate club for just one semester. Long enough to know a few moves in case Moon decided he needed more humility. It was a waste of time. Moon would have clobbered the best of them. Not if they were ready for him, necessarily, but that was the point. They would not have been ready.
He was still a virgin until the beginning of his sophomore year. And then he met Mary Beth. She was a freshman at St. Mary's.
Mary Beth, as it turned out, was a virgin as well but she arrived in South Bend determined to get over that hurdle as quickly as possible. It was she, actually, who picked him to be her first partner. She knew none of that other stuff about him. She simply liked him at first meeting and assumed, after two or three dates, that he would probably know what he was doing.
He admitted the truth. She laughed, then quickly did the same. She suggested that they learn together. For the next several months, they did.
“When we break up . . .” she said to him one day.
“Who says we will?”
“Come oh, Mike. I'm only a freshman.”
“Well anyway, what?”
“After your next girl and my next guy, let's sneak off and do it once more, okay? I mean, just to swap notes.”
You had to know Mary Beth.
To her, it made perfect sense to make this pact now because later you would have to call it two-timing. Doing it in advance made this a one-time prior commitment that would probably be of benefit to everyone concerned.
They did break up—when she thought it was time—and they did meet again. Just once. It was at an airport motel before she fiew back home to Tampa for the summer.
He wasn't sure how much he'd learned during their time apart. He'd been with one other freshman and one South Bend waitress. Enough to teach him that different women have very different needs and that not all of them see sex as a thing that should necessari
ly be enjoyed. Or that the enjoyment should be mutual.
Mary Beth certainly did. She didn't do quickies. She didn't do backseats or locked bathrooms. Mary Beth only made love. She did it slowly, considerately, and, above all, exuberantly. She did it in a way that could not be a sin. Fucking might be a sin. Making someone feel special was not.
She never came back to St. Mary's. She decided, over the summer, that she hated the cold weather and had forgotten how much she loved and missed her parents. She transferred to Florida State. They exchanged letters and phone calls for a while but he never saw her again. Still, she was, and would always be, a very special memory.
“You're falling off, Michael. Head up.”
Megan's voice brought him back to the present. He realized that she'd been watching him. He eased the bow into the wind.
“Tell me you were thinking about me,” she said.
She said it with a smile. But he thought he heard a hint of jealousy.
”I hardly stop thinking about you.”
“Except just then.”
“I was ... remembering an old friend. From years ago.”
“Will you ever tell me about her?”
He had to laugh. “You're something else, you know that, Megan?”
“What do you mean?”
”I only just learned your name, for Pete's sake. When do I find out about you?”
”I told you. You will over time.”
He made a face.
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Will you tell me about her?”
”I might. I might over time.”
She curled a lip, then stuck out her tongue at him.
Gotcha, Megan Cole. Gotcha.
Chapter 22
It took Mohammed Yahya just one afternoon, one visit to the Bronx, to make three new connections. Two of them were wholesale distributors. One was only a discount pharmacy.
The pharmacy, however, had the most interesting products and seemed to have them in good supply. It also, as a sideline, rented wheelchairs to convalescents and had an exclusive contract to service other wheelchairs that were owned by the several hospitals in the area. An exclusive contract, nearly always, meant that bribes had been paid and that hospital personnel, therefore, had been compromised. This was another good sign.
Best of all, on the window of this pharmacy was a bright orange decal with blue lettering. The decal said, “These premises protected by Parker Security Services, Inc.”
Mohammed Yahya smiled all the way back to Brooklyn and Villardi's Seafood Palace. Mr. Johnny, he thought, will be very pleased.
“Johnny had things to do,” said his brother. “Tell me.”
Yahya would have preferred to speak to the younger Giordano. Of the two, Mr. Johnny was the more respectful. Nonetheless, Yahya told him of the afternoon's events.
“Just like that?” Fat Julie asked. “You walked in off the street and they hired you?”
Best proof, thought the Pakistani, wounded. ”I did not always drive a crane, sir.”
“Even so . . .”
“All three tested my knowledge of pharmacology. They were most impressed. Mr. Giordano . . . this is not standing on street corners selling little bags of crack to drivers of cars from New Jersey.”
“Um ... no offense, Mohammed.”
”I am not without credentials. I am an educated man.”
Christ.
“Mohammed . . . have some orange juice.” He signaled the waiter.
As Julie had suspected, there was more to Yahya's getting hired than he wanted to admit. A couple of Yahya's paisans—who did sell little bags—had vouched for him. But his ace-in-the-hole reference had been the Giordano brothers.
Yahya's problem was that everyone knew that he'd been running a crane. This was a blue-collar job. It hurt his pride. All this time, therefore, he'd been telling those Bronx Pakistanis that the job on the docks was only a cover for the benefit of his parole officer. His real job had been more in the nature of a disciplinarian for the Giordano brothers.
Yahya, no doubt, had flicked a thumb across his throat as he said this. But he also said that the job was distasteful to a man of his entrepreneurial bent. It was time to strike out on his own again.
Fat Julie had no problem with the embroidery. It's good that Yahya admitted it because someone might check. But he was much more interested in what Yahya would be selling for this drugstore that was protected by the people who killed Jake.
”I will be selling these,” Yahya told him.
Yahya reached into the gym bag that he had brought with him. He produced two pharmacy-sized bottles, one of white pills and one of capsules.
“The capsules are Prozac. They are certainly counterfeit. The white pills are Vicodin. These may or may not be genuine.”
“Prozac.” Fat Julie had heard of it. “Isn't that the stuff that makes you crazy?”
”A canard. No doubt spread by competitors.”
“Bullshit. I seen it on TV. They said how some users get violent and a bunch of them killed themselves.”
“Not a bunch, Mr. Giordano. A handful out of perhaps five million. This should surprise anyone? The drug, after all, is taken for depression.”
“All the same . . .”
“Even your Food and Drug Administration has declined to take action. They said you don't throw out the baby for a few bad apples.”
Fat Julie doubted, somehow, that these were their exact words. But let's move along here. “These are both from AdChem?”
“So one would infer.”
Julie nodded. That decal on the window, “Protected by Parker,” did not suggest a tolerance of competitive lines.
“The Prozac. How can you tell it's bogus?”
The Pakistani opened one bottle and took out one capsule. It was half white, half pale green. The green half showed the maker's logo. The white half showed the brand name and dosage.
“Here.” Yahya pointed. “You see twenty milligrams? The abbreviation, 'mg,' is followed by a period. Some pills put a period after 'mg' but not Prozac. The typesetter made a mistake.”
“So they go cut rate or what?”
Yahya shook his head. “Full price, but only through street dealers. No hospitals. A doctor would not notice the error but a med nurse probably would.”
Fat Julie raised an eyebrow. “You said five million users?”
“Worldwide, more like ten.”
“And you think they're all hooked?”
“Hooked is not the right word. They simply want to feel the way it makes them feel.”
“Prozac's still fairly new. What's the potential?”
Yahya pointed to the sky.
“There are that many depressed?”
The Pakistani smiled.
Once again he was the teacher and that made him feel good. In this country, to see dark skin is to see an inferior. But that dark-skinned inferior might speak five languages. Most Americans can barely speak their own.
“Prozac,” he explained, “is for subclinical depression. That means you feel a little bit bad. For fifty cents, Prozac makes you feel much better. You are more confident, more aggressive, and you can have more fun at parties.”
“Sounds like cocaine,” Fat Julie noted, frowning.
“Better,” said the Pakistani.
Mohammed Yahya had gone back to work, a bonus of twenty crisp new fifties in his pocket. Fat Julie reviewed what he had scribbled on his cocktail napkin. Johnny was right. Notes do help you collect your thoughts. You just want to be sure you don't leave them in your pocket.
Vìcodin, which Yahya had to spell for him, did not seem all that interesting. You take it for pain but it also numbs the mind. No high, no rush, you just get this cozy, warm glow all over. There's money in it, Yahya says, because you keep needing more. Before long, you need a fix of a hundred pills a day to get the same feeling you got from four when you started. To get prescriptions for that many, you'd have to spend all day going to different d
octors and that gets expensive. Or you forge prescriptions or you break into drugstores, both of which put you in jail. Better to buy them on the street.
But the street dealer can't make a living selling Vicodin alone. He needs to find people who are seriously hooked and there aren't that many of them out there. The distributor had made Yahya take it on because, like distributors anywhere, they won't let you sell their top-of-the-line products unless you agree to take a dog or two as part of the package.
What makes Prozac top of the line, better even than Xanax, is that everybody's going to want it. Yahya says it's already very hot in all the big cities and on all the college campuses. He says forget about people who are looking to get high. He says Prozac is for people who are just a little bummed out—which is basically every teenager, every college kid, every adult who's ever been shit on, and anyone who's a fan of the Chicago Cubs. He says go to a cocktail party and ask around. He says try to find a salesman or a stockbroker or a guy in advertising who isn't on Prozac already.
The Shadow Box Page 18