Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

Michael, you’ll learn Spanish. I need good men, not hangers-on. It pays five hundred a week. Often much more. You do basic protection.

  You talk like a cop. How come your English is so good? I asked suspiciously.

  Listen to me, Michael, I’m no puta gangster smoking the product and blowing profits on cars and whores. My crew are the guys I could get, but I’m looking for quality and from what I’ve heard about you, you’ll fit right in.

  What have you heard? From who? How did you know where I was?

  Don’t worry, it is general information.

  This, in fact, worried me a great deal, but my face was studied and blank. I tried to appear relaxed. I grinned and breathed.

  Anyway, why would I want to work for you? I asked.

  Apart from the money?

  Yeah.

  I’ll help you.

  I looked at him. Ramón, a small man, but what presence, like a Dominican Rod Steiger. But even this doesn’t do him justice. Ramón took up a great deal of psychic space: he electrified the room and his prison eyes and wary stare brought up everyone else’s game, and we became hyperaware just as he was always cognizant of everyone and everything within a pistol shot.

  Help me do what? I asked.

  I’ll help you, he insisted.

  I shook my head and tried to figure out what was going on. Was he a fucking mind reader? What did he know? Things didn’t seem quite right. Was this a trap of some kind? Had Darkey put him up to this?

  Listen, mate, I don’t need a job, I already have one. I’m trying to keep a low profile, you know, I said.

  I know, he said, and smiled a very irritating smile. I’ll help you with that, too.

  I began to get a little scared now and measured the paces it would take me to get at the shotgun under the counter. Two steps, and it just pulls out. Neither of us spoke for a while, but I was first to crack:

  I need to know how you found out about me, I said, slowly.

  He nodded.

  I understand, he said.

  While he spoke, I tried to figure him out. The half-smile, Rolex watch, gold chain, expensive shirt, and yet it was all low key. This was the bare minimum he needed to impress his subordinates. Ramón wasn’t really the type for ostentation.

  Two days ago, someone saw you in here, someone who also was there at the bar. And yet I’d heard that you were dead, he said.

  From who?

  It had been put around that you and your crew had been killed in Mexico, murdered for skimming cream off the top. It had been put around that if that’s what happened to friends think what would happen to enemies.

  Oh, I said stupidly. If I’d been quicker, I’d have seen right there what the game was, but there was too much information for me to process at once. Something going on, but I couldn’t figure out what. If it were me, I would never in a million years hire someone who wasn’t a countryman or an old friend. You never go to strangers for this kind of deal. You can never know them well enough. Look at Mrs. Gandhi and her Sikh bodyguards, proof enough right there. The emperor Darius, another example. I had to think pretty quickly. First, was he threatening me? If I didn’t take the job, was he going to tell Darkey I was here? Second, what was the hidden agenda? What was it? Ok, thinking. The second part of it I wasn’t going to get tonight. Too smart for that. The first I might. I decided the best thing was just to come right out and ask him.

  Listen, uh, mister, uh, Ramón.

  Yes.

  Listen, Ramón, are you threatening me? If I don’t take the job are you going to spread it around where I am?

  He looked very serious. His lips narrowed, his eyes didn’t blink.

  I assume you do not mean to be insulting. Please take my card and think it over. We can help each other. That’s all.

  He handed me a card. It was white and had a phone number on it, nothing else. He turned round and his boys all got up at once. They all walked out without another word.

  The door closed behind them, and I knew immediately I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted to stay in New York, I’d have to go with him. Even if Ramón wasn’t going to say anything, sooner or later it would come out. Darkey had more men and resources. Sunshine would see to it that Mr. Duffy knew there was a problem. Mr. Duffy had dozens of people whom he could call upon to dispose of an irritant like me. In half an hour, my world was somewhere in my fucking whips.

  I had no choice. And I knew then. No more spying on Bridget, no more meditating on the roof. The honeymoon was over. I called the number an hour later.

  Ramón, I—

  He cut me off. He said to say nothing, that he liked to do important things in person and he would come back down. I hung up, both irritated and strangely pleased with this way of doing biz. He came back in just before two. The place was deserted. He came alone. No boys.

  He sat opposite.

  You’ve decided, he said.

  I stuck out my hand.

  Ramón, I said, where thy lodgest, I will lodge, and thy people will be my people and thy god, my god.

  He smiled and shook my hand.

  And that was that. I went home. Stripped, showered, went to bed. It was all done. Ramón was to be the facilitator. I lay there. Harlem out there in the night, alive and beautiful. I lay and listened.

  Ramón is the conduit they’ve chosen, I said. The last piece.

  I closed my eyes and put my hands behind my head. I rested in the long, cold arms of Nemesis and readied myself for the blows to come.

  10: A STOLEN CAR TO OYSTER BAY

  R

  amón turned out to be a brief, enigmatic, but useful presence in my life. He oozed charm and charisma. Gentle, quiet, persuasive, but that’s what they sometimes said about the Führer, and you couldn’t forget that Ramón’s crew was responsible for about a murder a week, although he might say in justification that this was only self-defense. Not that my hands were completely clean on that score (if you counted Dermot) and in any case what was my excuse for the murders yet to be?

  They got me a flat on 181st Street on the fifth floor of a building that looked right over the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson. The apartment was amazing, with hardwood floors and long windows and modern appliances, twice the size of the place I’d been in on 123rd Street, and the neighborhood was good. The 180s near the river was a little Jewish section in the middle of Dominican Washington Heights. Mostly older folks, who got on well with the majority community.

  My apartment was airy and wonderful. At night, when I wasn’t working, I’d sit and look out the big bay living-room windows. There’s a bit in Citizen Kane when one of Kane’s buddies is being interviewed in a nursing home and in the background you can see the GWB, and that’s exactly the view I had—except in color.

  Nominally, I had become part of Ramón’s inner circle: a “lieutenant.” He employed me as a bodyguard, and a shifty little man called José gave me an Uzi submachine gun and a Colt .45 semiautomatic. I’d fired a Colt ACP before, a huge, loud, terrifying weapon that was standard issue to U.S. Army officers for seventy years, so the gun must have had some good qualities. I, however, couldn’t shoot the thing. I mean, it’d blow the head off anything closer than twenty feet, but for me, at least, it was horribly inaccurate at distance. Also, the magazine would jam, and it made me jump when flames would come out of the barrel. And, of course, I hadn’t fired an Uzi. The British Army would never countenance such a silly and vulgar weapon, and I mistrusted it right from the start. I wore a custom jacket that Ramón had a tailor make up for me and carried both guns in shoulder holsters, but the Uzi I kept on the right-hand side without the clip in to make it a bit more comfortable.

  Ramón never once revealed his real plans for me and I, for one, simply could not buy his story of needing reliable men. The morning after our meeting, a van showed up for my stuff, such stuff as I had. I didn’t see Ramón for the next few days. He told me about the apartment on the phone and hinted that he might meet me there, but I waited for him and he didn’t appear. The
super saw me in and around and refused a twenty-dollar tip.

  The next day, José showed up with a tailor. He gave me five hundred dollars in hundreds and told me to get some shirts and a pair of shoes. A man came and installed premium cable and a phone. Furniture was delivered from Pier 1.

  A couple of days after that, a car came for me and took me down to a restaurant near Ramón’s place. It was early evening and Ramón introduced me to the lieutenants, who were polite but not particularly friendly. Everyone spoke Spanish all the time. After the introductions I was fitted out with my weapons, and I just sat there sipping Corona.

  My whole role in the setup seemed completely false and out of place, but Ramón did his best to make me feel comfortable by having the occasional conversation with me in English about sports and the weather. At eleven o’clock, after what I suppose had been a getting-to-know-you meeting, I rode a cab back to 181st Street.

  The next day, I was summoned down again. This time to his loft. The lieutenants were out pounding the beat and I was alone with Ramón, José, and the two bodyguards.

  My real job was the unspoken thing between us. He knew that I suspected that it was all a fabrication, and what’s more, he knew that I knew that he knew, but he kept his lip shut.

  Ramón, if I’m your bodyguard, why don’t you want me to live here? I asked him.

  You’re my bodyguard on important occasions. You have a very special role, Michael, he said. That seemed to end the conversation, and I nodded. Ramón went back to his paper.

  I spent the afternoon there. Ramón went into his study and closed the door, and in the evening, the lieutenants came back again with the money.

  If you’ve seen any of the druggy ghetto-fabulous films of the ’80s and ’90s, you might have the wrong impression of Ramón’s lifestyle. It’s true that he lived in a nice loft, but there was only one girl (Carmen, a slender, frumpy little thing who lived with her mother at night and only sometimes came to see Ramón in the evenings) and no partying, and no one was allowed to sample the product. Ramón’s place contained a white sofa, a dozen white leather lounge chairs, a huge stereo, many CDs, a few coffee tables, but also an enormous mahogany bookcase with books in English, Spanish, and French. The living room must have been the size of a basketball court and the furniture appeared so tiny in this space that it had an ascetic feel to it. Ramón, I think, enjoyed bucking people’s expectations of him. He often had people up there, and it was never the way they expected it to be. An old building in the 150s on the river, huge and bare, overlooking a gloomy, leafless park. It sat above three derelict floors of an old middle school. To get up to it, you had to climb the outside fire escape. I suppose that this was for security reasons, although it’s conceivable that he could have just been saving his money for the time when he could have the whole building done over in suitable style.

  Since most of the boys spoke to one another in fast Dominican Spanish, I was more or less cast as an outsider from the beginning. No one made an effort to get to know me, and I got the impression that they believed that I was one of the boss’s whims and would be disposed of when (probably in a few weeks) Ramón tired of me. Since no one made an attempt to engage me in conversation, I took to wandering around the place when Ramón was in the bedroom or in his private study—the only two areas that were out of bounds. I often went out on the balcony for a breath of air, although the air was always a bit dodgy because of the huge sewage plant on 138th Street. I would have enjoyed a smoke, but I’d given it up. Back inside, the boys were chatting and ignoring me. Ramón’s bookshelf was interesting: about a thousand books, but fewer than a dozen had their spines broken. Clearly, when Ramón had come into money he’d bought the books all at once to fill out the bookcase, but whether they were a pose or he actually intended to read them I’m not sure.

  So there’s me reading his books or having a breather outside; Ramón and José are in the study and the other lieutenants are making up baggies. Every day like the first day of school, awkward, unpleasant.

  In Ramón’s organization, he had about two or sometimes three dozen people working for him on an informal basis. A core of five lieutenants, all Dominican: Sammy, Iago, Pedro, Moreno, and the number-two in the outfit, José. There were two bodyguards, one nineteen-year-old Cuban guy called Devo (like the band), though everybody called him Cuba, and another Dominican guy called Hector. Outside of these seven and me (who became formally the third bodyguard), the rest of the employees were all cannon fodder. At night, the lieutenants would make up the baggies in a lab Ramón had built himself at the back of his apartment—small and white, stinking. It wasn’t out of bounds, but the lieutenants saw it as their fiefdom and kept the bodyguards and even José out of there. In the morning, the lieutenants would distribute the baggies to the safety men, who would hold them, and then sellers would hit the streets. Once you’d bought a bag, you’d go to the safety man, who was in an alley or fake store, and if everything was cool, he would give it to you. For every one person selling the five- or ten-dollar baggies, there would be three others keeping an eye on the street and another man who accompanied you to the safety man. Typically, a seller could make about three hundred dollars an hour, up to two or three thousand a day. The seller saw about 5 to 10 percent of what he made, depending upon the caprice of Ramón’s lieutenants. I estimated that Ramón was probably taking in sixty thousand a week. I don’t know if he had to pay off anyone or what exactly his expenses were, but clearly it was a bloody gold mine.

  No one seemed to have any moral qualms about selling crack to addicts who would prostitute themselves or steal or go to the lengths of robbing their own family and pawning their kid’s possessions to pay for the stuff. Ramón never seemed to give any lectures about not selling to kids or waifs or madmen, but then I don’t speak Spanish, so maybe he did.

  Ramón owned a Mercedes, but he drove it himself, and there were very few extraneous expenses.

  Ten days had gone by, and every afternoon I had reported for work and hung out doing nothing until evening and then gone home. I’d done bugger-all to earn anything, but I consoled myself with the thought that I had over a thousand dollars now saved, and because of all the plantains and rice and beans, I had gained about ten pounds and was getting stronger.

  The time would come when I’d have to say goodbye to this purgatorial existence, when I’d have to do what I’d come to New York to do, but I figured I could build myself up for a wee while yet. Ramón had not revealed why he really wanted me around, and I was beginning to think that he really was just a whimsical eejit who had taken a shine to me.

  I made my own routine, and I usually went over there at around one or two in the P.M. The mornings were my own, and sometimes I’d haunt the old places where I used to live in the city. I had a job to do, but I had to wait, not for a sign exactly, or an alignment in the heavens, but I had to know that the moment was right.

  My favorite place in the late morning was 125th Street. None of Darkey’s boys would ever be down there, and for me it was old and familiar and I felt like a tourist now that I was living on 181st. 125th, badland and desperateland but almost a home. Sometimes I’d walk by Mr. Han’s Chinky, but I wouldn’t go in, and now and again I paid Jim a visit in the Blue Moon.

  When I was feeling particularly good I would set myself projects. I’d try and do five parks in a day, or go from river to river. Or try to find the highest spot in Manhattan. One day I walked the entire length of Fifth Avenue for no reason at all. I was so late I had to call Ramón and tell him I wasn’t coming (Ramón, of course, didn’t seem the least concerned or interested). Fifth Avenue starts in abject poverty and dislocation in Harlem, but by the time you hit Central Park, you’re in the territory of millionaires and that stays with you all the way down to the Village. I didn’t stop in anywhere; I brought a water bottle and a hat and just walked. The canyons opening up and the people getting fancier and more white. Cats and stray dogs and rats disappearing and being replaced by pigeons only. Scho
olkids at first in jeans and big jackets and then in blazers and ties. The soundtrack growing steadily all the while: crying radios and jackhammers and people and cars. I’d walked the whole length on a fake foot.

  Impressed by this success, I did the walk of Broadway, too, but I had to do it over two days, and I only walked the Broadway that’s in Manhattan, for, of course, it goes up into the Bronx (and on to Westchester), but up there is too near the Four P., which was risky. Broadway isn’t so linear an ascent from chaos to civilization. It has its ups and downs, poverty rising and falling like a sine curve. It begins in water, and you can see animals and boats. And then south through park and project, black and Spanish and then black and then Spanish again. A crazy cinema. Bodegas. The Audubon Ballroom. A funeral swelling out from a Mormon church, sorrow seeping through the walls and out the windows. Then, below 120th it gentrifies as Columbia University breathes her love and influence into the surrounding streets, and then there’s life for a few blocks and below 99th it becomes the Upper West Side. All the way down Broadway through the theaters, brick stacks, construction sites, porno shows, shops, holes in the ground with the whiff of sulfur.

  Yeah, those were three good days, and I was almost happy.

  I saw Ramón the night after Broadway and asked him if there was anything he wanted me to do.

  Nothing, he said.

  I wasn’t satisfied with this. I was ready for something. Trouble, heavying, even a minor cutting-out expedition. But Ramón was all patience. Annoyingly so.

  Get yourself strong. Relax, I’ll tell you when I need you, he said. Walk, move.

  I did as I was bid.

  I went everywhere. From river to river, from island to mainland and back. The PATH and the subway and the M4 bus.

  I went to dour Saint Pat’s and I went to Riverside Church and the great Saint John the Divine, surely the holiest place in the city outside of Monument Park in Yankee Stadium. (For even a Mick who’s never seen a baseball game in his life has heard of Gehrig and Ruth and Mantle and DiMaggio.)