Bigger Than Jesus

by Robert Chazz Chute

  You won’t pine over Harv’s untimely demise. The shower spray bothers you much more. Each water droplet feels like a stick pounding on a drum. Your nose is straight, thanks to your painful efforts in first aid, but it feels thick and both your eyes are black. You taste blood as you run your tongue over your teeth but none are loose.

  Big Denny was a bulldozer in his day. “In his day.” Like he wasn’t alive as recently as yesterday. Your sense of time is screwed up. So much has happened since last night, it feels like everything is slowed down and you’re noticing everything more.

  One of your combat instructors was a hard rock named Sgt. Devin, but of course, everyone called him The Devil. The Devil said something about focus and time once, how when the adrenaline is pumping, your eyes will dilate and you’ll think you can actually see the bullets whizzing by. You go into bullet-time like in a video game and you focus on details.

  “Don’t focus on the wrong details,” The Devil said. “The wrong details will get you killed.” Is that what you are doing now? Jimmy Lima’s on the warpath and he doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as it’s not him. Instead of sitting at the bottom of a motel shower in Jersey crying over Denny, you should be getting the money and grabbing Lily for a run back to Miami or even someplace boring as long as it’s far away from here.

  Focus on the storage locker, dumbass.

  Reassess: You have to find Panama Bob’s storage locker before anyone else opens it. Jimmy wants the skim. Pete thinks the skim is a load of counterfeit money and a ticket to becoming the Boss. Now is not the time to hit the pause button.

  The shower and fresh clothes make you feel a little more human. You may never feel like your old self again, but Armani salves a lot of wounds. You tell Lily you’ll be a while but you’ll bring back coffee. You slip out the door and take a walk. Within five blocks you find an Internet cafe. You order a bagel with some lox and a medium roast Tanzanian Peaberry coffee. Even in an armpit off the Jersey turnpike, you can still order a fancy coffee.

  Your Internet search reveals a couple of storage companies by the Brooklyn Bridge and another cluster north of the meatpacking district. The heat is soothing and the caffeine helps you focus, but your jaw is so sore, the bagel takes a lot of time to get down. Halfway through the bagel, you think you’ve found the most likely target.

  Most of the storage facilities are the indoor type with lots of security. Bob would want a place close to his building, but easy to get in and out of without a lot of fuss. Bob never walked anywhere unless he had to, so it’s hardly a surprise when you discover a storage business on Greene Street. It’s less than two blocks from Panama Bob’s office. It’s not a converted office building like most storage places. Instead, from Google Maps, it looks like several rows of little garages across from a big Post Office. Bob’s key looked like it would fit a padlock rather than a regular door.

  Next all you have to do is grab the key from the bathroom at the pizza place, get to the storage locker and get out of the line of fire. “Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy,” as Tia Marta used to say as she gave your balls a rough squeeze.

  “I love American idioms,” she’d say in her thick German accent. “They are so nonsensical. A fat chance and a thin chance is the same to them. They say across the street and right across the street and that means the same. Americans say a healthy helping of food but that looks very different from a healthy helping of food.”

  Tia Marta looked down on Americans, but she’d chosen to come here. She called you a dirty boy when she found you in the basement, but then she’d held you all night and let you cry into her shoulder when you told her about how your father died. She helped you, but hurt you, too. Americans weren’t the only people full of contradictions. She made you love her…at first.

  You’re almost back to the motel with a BLT and a coffee for Lily when your phone rings. The caller ID says it’s Pete. You let it ring through to voicemail as you search out a public telephone. Pete’s right. Finding a phone is harder than it used to be and there are no phone booths.

  At a strip plaza, you find a bank of three phones with the telephone books ripped to pieces and only one of the phones works. You wipe it off with your handkerchief before you put the receiver anywhere near your mouth. You remember Tia Marta saying that a gentleman always carries a handkerchief, which was ironic because she did not allow you any clothes. She was right, though. With a handkerchief you can blow your nose, bandage a wound, conceal your identity, gag or even strangle a guy if you have to.

  You call Pete on his private phone, the one he’s sure isn’t bugged. He answers after one ring.

  “Lily safe?”

  “Yeah.” After last night, it’s nice to hear worry in Pete’s voice. “She’s freaked out and won’t get out of bed, but that’s natural.”

  “Oh God… Listen, don’t go back to her apartment.”

  “Does Jimmy have somebody watching it?”

  “Ah. Geez. I wasn’t thinking about that possibility. No, Jake, the idiot, used way too much bleach. We’ll have to air it out before it’s safe. The moron put bleach on top of ammonia! By the time I showed up to see what he was up to, he was almost passing out on top of the…uh, ketchup.”

  “Tragic.”

  “Bleach and ammonia don’t go together! Am I the only one around here who knows anything? Christ!”

  There are so many ways to die. Denny’s dead yet Jake lives. There are so many ways for things to go ugly, so many ways to end up dead and disappointed.

  “Too bad you found him. Jake could have been on one of those Most Moronic Criminals shows or 1,000 Ways to Die or something.”

  “What did Harv tell you before he got his bottle broke?”

  Pete assumes it was you who killed Harv. That’s fine. “If he was telling the truth, we got a civil war within The Machine up one nostril and war with the Romanians up the other. Jimmy will do whatever he can to make Vincent think it wasn’t him who ordered Bob’s hit. But no matter what Jimmy says, the Romanians have nothing to do with it. This is an in-house matter and Jimmy’s making things worse.”

  “If Jimmy blames the Romanians, then you’re in the clear.”

  “I thought about that. It would be nice to be in the clear, but as soon as the police let Vincent know how the investigation is progressing, I’ll be the slaughtered goat. Camera caught my face on the way out and witnesses in the street saw Denny. Maybe me, too, if somebody was looking out the window at the lightning storm. Either you move up in the ranks and save me from Jimmy and Vincent, or I’m dead.”

  You listen to Pete breathe and when he says nothing, you add, “Jimmy sent Harv over to Lily’s apartment. With him dead, Jimmy might decide to clean house, including you and Lily. It’s not mutiny when the officers are trying to kill their own soldiers, Pete. Your loyalty is to Vincent, not his asshole son who is too ambitious for anybody’s good.”

  “Yeah,” Pete says. “I get it. It’s me or him. I should have known. Jimmy was an asshole even when he was a cute little kid.”

  “Is the old man awake? How’d his surgery go?”

  “Of course. He’ll be fine. Vincent can’t be killed. He’s bulletproof. He’s fuckin’ immortal. Vincent Lima took three bullets in the ’80s on three separate occasions before he got to the top. You watch. They whipped out the guy’s prostate” — he pronounces it prostrate — “through a smokin’ hole. Give ’em a few weeks and a Viagra and he’ll be down at the strip club talkin’ a stripper out to his car with nothing but a smile and a bindle of coke.”

  You ask Pete if he’s talked to Vincent yet.

  “How am I supposed to tell him one son’s dead by the other’s hand and his heir apparent is going to get us all killed?”

  You consider this and think about the seeds you planted last night when he had you tied up and was threatening to burn your balls with cigarettes. “There’s the other way,” you say.

  “What are you saying, Jesus?”

  “I’m saying Vincent needs a new heir appar
ent. A guy with a steady hand on The Machine’s wheel. Somebody who goes back a long way with Vincent. You could do the right thing and kill Jimmy and never tell Vincent you did him a solid.”

  “You’re talking mutiny and treachery and some evil Shakespearian shit there, Jesus.”

  “I’m talking about being faithful to Vincent’s legacy. Jimmy’s already stirring up trouble with the Banda. If Jimmy were to end up shot, it would follow that the Romanians got Bob and then they went after Jimmy.”

  The wrinkle for Pete is that there’d still be a bloody gang war. Not your problem. The heat would be off you long enough to disappear with Lily. The security cam won’t be a problem with you a thousand miles away.

  “The old man thinks his dumb ass sons are his legacy,” Pete says.

  “Man plans, God pulls down Man’s pants and mocks. Vincent’s legacy should be preserving The Machine, not grinding the gears and ripping out the works.”

  “What I’ve said before sarcastically, I now say in earnest. You’re smart, Jesus. Look after my little girl while I sort this out. When I’m Vincent’s Number Two, you’re coming up in the world and we’ll have a sweet project what with all that sweet fake dough and all.”

  Good. Let the wise guys chase each other around while you slip out of the way and down the I-95. You could go Down Under (mob-speak for Florida and your old stomping grounds.) They do have some useful gun laws down in Florida and you do miss the beach.

  Orlando is a nice, relatively war-free zone. Mob clashes too close to Disney would alarm the tourists and bring down the Feds’ wrath so organized crime steers clear. The Families, Companies, Corporations, Machines, Bands, Clubs, Tribes and Offices all leave Orlando alone so the profits go to the Mouse. Besides, even gangsters want to take their kids to Disney and not have to worry.

  Maybe Florida is too obvious and Jimmy would come looking. There’s that little town up in Maine along the coast you’ve heard about. Poeticule Bay. All they’ve got up there is a lighthouse, a tiny police department that hands out speeding tickets and a view of the seagulls to one side and a view of the woods on the other. It was in the papers when the town’s sheriff went missing. The body was never found. If they can lose a cop, you can certainly go invisible ninja and disappear there. Poeticule Bay would still be close enough, you might even duck into the Big Apple to visit your tailor down in the Village.

  But what are you going to tell Lily and will she come with you? When Pete rises to the top, he’ll leave you alone as long as you’re married to his daughter. Once things settle down, maybe you could come back to New York. You’ll need a couple kids by then, just for extra insurance. Pete’s tough, but he won’t mess with the father of his grandchildren. At least, you don’t think he will. A lot of this will depend on Lily. You’ll give her whatever she wants if she’ll just stay with you, anything at all for her smile.

  You’ve already been away too long and it’s not like your body has recovered from Denny’s beating and getting slapped around by Pete. In fact, if anything, you’re more sore now than you were this morning. You need to get the coffee into Lily, cheer her up and make her eat. Then you’ll curl up next to her, sleep, recover and wait until dark to get back to the pizza place in Tribeca. You’ll get the key.

  Then it’s on to the Greene Street storage locker to see what treasures Bob buried. It seems like the perfect plan, but there are so many ways to die. Even as you snuggle up, spooning Lily, feeling her warmth and the softness of the pillow at your cheek, you have an inkling. Things have not gone well for you in the last twenty-four hours. The worst should be behind you. It should be easy from here on out.

  Then you think of what you told Pete last night. It was the one thing you said that was unadulterated truth: Sometimes life really is like a Coen brothers’ movie. Coen brothers movies are your favorites: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Blood Simple and A Serious Man. Their movies ring ludicrous and true because things keep going wrong on the wide and easy road out of town.

  “What are you thinking about?” Lily asks.

  Your face is in her hair and your nose must not be too bad because you can get a whiff of lavender. You can’t tell her any of this. “I was just thinking about Fargo. Remember how it was raining and we bought it from the guy with the box of DVDs on the sidewalk down by the Chambers subway, after we went into that Jamba Juice that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember how neither of us had seen the movie and we didn’t have any expectations? We didn’t know a thing about that movie. It had slipped below our radar somehow so when we watched it, it was this big surprise because we expected so little and got so much. Wouldn’t it be great if everything worked like that?”

  “Are you saying I expect too much out of life?” Lily asks.

  “No, no…. I’m just saying how great it is when things work out, like you go for normal and you get great.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever get to normal after this?”

  You’re still talking into the back of her head. “Wouldn’t regular, old normal be great? We could live like regular people. Be one of those citizens you see all the time, running off to a job somewhere, paying taxes and having kids.”

  She rolls over and stares at your broken face, studying your black eyes. “You want to have a regular job and pay taxes?”

  It still hurts to smile. “Well, maybe not that part. But something close to normal would be great. Great is great, but for people like us? After this? Just normal would be great, too, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so. When can we start with normal, Jesus? I mean, we’re falling asleep in a cheap little motel in Jersey. No one wants that.”

  You laugh and tell her that’s what you thought, too.

  “I can’t stop thinking about Harv. He was going to shoot you.”

  “He did shoot at me. He missed. Not by much.”

  Lily is quiet. When she finally speaks again, you can tell by her eyes that she’s still back in the apartment murdering Harv. “I read once that they did this study about free will.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “They. Them. You know. People who study the brain and stuff. They did this study where they asked people to choose something. I don’t know what, but they could see on some kind of brain scanner that the choice is made before people think it’s made.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the choices we make…maybe they aren’t our choices. Maybe we’re just puppets and there is no free will, like this is a play and God’s just watching it for His amusement.”

  “So you didn’t choose to hit Harv in the head to save me?”

  “It’s not that I didn’t choose exactly. It’s that I didn’t really have a choice. Free will might just be an illusion. If it is, we’re all innocent. I want to feel innocent. I’m asking, what’s it all about? Do we really have free will or is everything predestined? Tonight, for the first time, I don’t want independence. I want God to take the blame and leave me alone.”

  “Despite my name, this is too deep for me. You need to talk to a priest. I don’t know about free will. All I got is…making choices? That’s for other people. People with money get to make choices.”

  Lily lays her head on your chest. Her warm tears soak through your shirt. And you think of Panama Bob’s skim. How much could it be? Enough to have choices, anyway.

  “The worst is behind us,” you assure her.

  The worst should be behind you. Pete kills Jimmy. You pass go and do not go to jail, either. You get the skim and evaporate into the wind with the girl of your dreams. But the more you think, the worst is behind me, the more sure you are that you will trip headfirst into some deep Shakespearian shit.

  Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.

  LIES & PIE

  You find a place to park Lily’s car near NYU and take your time, strolling and doubling back, winding through the city. You try to look casual, checking in reflections
in store windows and scanning for any sign of a tail. It pays to be paranoid. You only have to screw up once and your head will end up on a pike.

  There’s a murder house in Jersey. Denny told you, though he was fuzzy on the details. He would only say that he’d been there once when he was inducted and it took two days for the tortured rat to die.

  “I didn’t have a hand in it,” Denny was quick to point out. “I had to watch. Made me dirty. They got a couple of guys from out of town to do the work. They enjoyed it too much. One guy had a blowtorch. The other guy used vice grips.”

  That’s the problem with The Machine. If Vincent has a place set aside just for the purpose of murdering rivals and traitors, he’s wasting a lot of energy and operating on a bad business model. When you came back from Iraq and Afghanistan, you should have looked harder for work instead of letting Denny get you into Vincent’s business. It looked like easy money at the time and the military had left you with a limited skill set.

  You pass the Silver Center for Arts and Science. When you first got to New York City, dark from the sun, you did what every newcomer does and what no native New Yorker would ever do. You took bus tours with people from all over the world and stared up. Awful histories aren’t just for poor people in the desert. Before the Silver Center was an arts and science building, it was the Brown Building. Before that, it was the Asch Building.

  You remember because the name was ironic. Up there, 146 garment workers died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, just over 100 years ago. Ninety years before 9/11, New York saw sixty-two people, most of them young seamstresses, leap to their death from a high building, some of them on fire as they fell. Just the thought of it makes you dizzy and you’re out on the ledge with Bob again. You close your eyes and wait for the feeling to pass.