Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “Hey, what’s up?” Ray called out from halfway down the hall, where he had come to an abrupt stop at the first sight of him.

  “Yeah, I was waiting for you,” Salim said, his face studiously blank.

  “OK.” Ray held his ground.

  “Can we go in?”

  Ray was about to say “I was just leaving,” then spent the next few seconds scrambling for a smoother walkaway. In the end, embarrassment as much as anything else had him reluctantly moving forward, digging in his pocket for the keys. And when the apartment door was finally opened, Salim was the first one through, gliding past Ray like he split the rent, immediately setting himself to pacing, smoking, his glance bouncing off surfaces like tracer fire.

  Remaining in the open doorway, one foot still in the hall, Ray attempted to take Salim’s measure; in addition to the raw agitation, there was something physically different about him tonight.

  “So Salim, what’s up?” he asked in a voice way too lively. “What’s happening?”

  “What’s happening?” Salim repeated mindlessly, perching momentarily on the edge of the coffee table, then popping right up again and resuming patrol.

  “What’s shaking?” clutching the doorknob behind his back with both hands. “How’s Omar?”

  “Omar?” Salim moved to the window and peered out at the black river. “He’s good.”

  “Michelle go to Atlanta?”

  “Michelle?” Salim did an about-face back into the living room. “No.”

  “You two back together?” Ray starting to pay as little attention to his own questions as Salim now.

  “No.”

  “OK,” Ray said, tensely pondering this new Salim, simultaneously distracted and all business.

  Pointedly leaving the front door ajar, he reluctantly came inside and took a seat on the corner of the couch as Salim moved to the glass again; and when he whirled back into the room this time, Ray was finally able to pinpoint the physical change in him: a uniform thickness around the rib cage, as if he were inflated.

  “What did you do to yourself?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You bulk up on steroids or something?”

  “Nah, nah.” Salim stopped short and briefly raised his sweatshirt to reveal a bulletproof vest.

  “So what’s up,” Ray said quickly. “What can I do for you?” Just wanting now to speed the kid along to his cash money punch line and then, he hoped, the door.

  “Yeah well, no, see, I couldn’t get . . .” Salim took a deep breath, then forced himself to settle on the edge of the coffee table again, his knees pumping. “OK. See. I need a vendor’s license, right?”

  “I know. Five hundred dollars,” Ray said, then just couldn’t help adding, “That was already factored in.”

  “Yeah uh-huh but like, OK I went downtown to get one, right?” Salim’s eyes were trained on a spot over Ray’s left shoulder. “You have got to have . . . You have got to be a war veteran, see, ’cause they got like a five-year waiting list, and war veterans get top priority.”

  “War veterans. Not just veterans? You have to have been in actual combat?”

  There was a paperback peeking out of Salim’s sweatshirt muff, furled tight as a newspaper. Ray couldn’t catch the title.

  “Well, I don’t know about the combat part, per se . . .” Salim addressed the skyline across the water now. “But they got a five-year waiting list and the veterans come first.”

  “Well, that sucks,” Ray said brightly, a chagrined anger in him briefly boiling over.

  Salim sat up straighter for a moment in response to Ray’s edgy tone but then simply forged on.

  “OK, the thing is? I got this cousin, right? He’s gonna hook me up with this dude in the, the license bureau? He says if I slip this guy an extra five hundred? Like, under the table? He can jump me up on the list, get me my license in about six months.”

  “No kidding,” Ray said, thinking, Is he asking for five hundred, then? Or a thousand . . .

  The six months’ wait after the bribe was a nice realistic touch, though.

  “Because I’m getting rousted wherever I go, so . . .” Salim trailed off, as if exhausted by his own saga, his mouth hanging open in expectation.

  They were seated facing each other barely a foot apart, and from this close up Salim’s skin looked bad, ashy; his short, tight, normally fastidious crop was a little unkempt, too, individual corkscrews sprouting up here and there like the first tendrils of spring. And then Ray noticed, for the first time, that Salim’s hair was starting to go gray; the kid twenty-nine, thirty years old tops, still looking to get on base any way he could.

  “So, Ray . . .” His pitch apparently done, he became nearly motionless.

  But, overcome by an embarrassed surliness as he found himself recalling the semi-euphoric flush of altruism that he had experienced in lessening degrees on each of the kid’s previous cash-themed visits, Ray refused to bite.

  “Yeah, so . . .” Salim still waiting.

  And then Ray finally caught the title of that paperback peeking out of the sweatshirt: Samurai Sense: A Bushido Primer for the 21st-Century Businessman. And in a red rush of pity and anger, the words were out of his mouth before he could shut himself down. “Hey Salim, I’m not a fucking cash machine.”

  At first, they just stared at each other, mutually astonished; then Salim levitated from the edge of the coffee table into a half-crouch. “You’re not what?” His mouth fish-round, his face clouding with blood. “Why you got to say something like that?” the words exploding out of him in a choleric gobble.

  Ray felt stop-time dreamy, the clock a Popsicle stick lost somewhere in the back of a freezer.

  “It came out wrong,” he said evenly, not sure he could rise to his feet without provoking something physical. “I’m a little off today.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that,” the question not really a question, Salim’s mouth remaining locked in that spittle-flecked ring, his unblinking eyes aping the shape.

  Ray said nothing.

  “You’re not a fuckin’ cash machine?”

  “Look, no disrespect. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” hating the phony nonchalance of his own voice.

  “Did I ask you for money?” Salim’s voice getting dangerously wobbly.

  “I guess I misunderstood,” Ray said carefully, trying to maintain eye contact. “So how can I help you . . .”

  But, finessed by his own disclaimer, Salim remained locked in that outraged crouch. “What, you scared of me now?”

  “No.”

  “Why you got to talk to me like that, huh?” Salim was almost shouting now. “Why.”

  “I told you,” Ray said, then froze as he spied the upright steel shaft of an eight-inch screwdriver tilting out of the back pocket of Salim’s jeans like a miniature lance.

  “Ah, Coley,” he heard himself say huskily. “What the hell are you doing, you have so much to live for.”

  “I what?” Salim’s face twisted chaotically.

  At first, Ray felt half-moved by his own earnest tone; then repulsed by it, repulsed by the fact that even now he was automatically reviewing himself, his words; Ray once again brought face to face with the narcissism that propelled so much of his largesse, alive to how it brought him to this room, this jam; and as he came out of shock into a low state of self-disgust, his voice, for the first time since he’d come through the door, became truly his own.

  “Well,” he passed a trembling hand across his mouth as he rigidly refused to lower his gaze to Salim’s back pocket again. “The fact of the matter is, whether you came here for money or not, I’m completely tapped out.”

  And then, spurred by an overwhelming desire to speed things along to their natural conclusion one way or the other, he finally rose to his feet. “And I think I need to ask you to leave.”

  Thank You—March 12–March 13

  At five minutes before midnight, a filthy orange cab sat with its left front tire up on the curb of JFK Boulev
ard, exhaust fumes curling upward from the tailpipe into the crisp March night. In the sporadic headlights of oncoming cars, Pete Heinz, stopped at the intersection directly across the street, could see the drama within unfold; the passenger leaning forward from the rear seat, an arm hooked around the turbaned driver’s throat, his free hand pressing a knife against this poor bastard’s gullet.

  Despite the direness of the tableau, Heinz, on the groovy side of drunk, absolutely knew that everything was going to turn out OK, and as he parked his own homeward-bound sedan and gingerly picked his way across the broad two-way street, he found himself scrambling for a memorable one-liner with which to dismantle the play.

  Coming up from behind the cab and resting his forearms on the open front passenger-side window as if it were a backyard fence, he saw that the passenger was a youngish black man and that the weapon half-buried in the Sikh driver’s beard was, in fact, a screwdriver.

  “No, no, no,” he addressed the kid in the backseat. “You see the turban? You got to use a Phillips head.”

  For an endless off-balance moment, both the driver and the jail-bound kid stared at him with a look of deep embarrassment, as if there was sex involved. The driver recovered first, abruptly swatting the screwdriver upward and away, accidentally slashing his own cheek in the process, then rolling out of his door onto the boulevard, instantly popping upright and hop-dancing away from his cab, one hand to his freshly bloody face, the other pointed accusingly at the backseat.

  The kid, still holding his weapon, just sat there, slumped and distant.

  Heinz leaned into the window a little more in order to study this bonehead: coffee-skinned, delicate in both frame and face, tiny turned-down ears and a small pursed mouth. He was dressed in spotless Timberland from sweatshirt to work boots.

  Without ever looking at Heinz, the kid disgustedly tossed the screwdriver into the front passenger seat.

  “Stinks in here,” he muttered, sulkily rolling down his rear-seat window.

  “Are you wearing a vest?” Heinz asked. “Please tell me you’re not wearing a Kevlar vest.”

  The kid shrugged and looked away.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you,” Heinz said evenly.

  “I’m arrested, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I get my phone call, right?”

  Enjoying himself, Heinz tossed his county-owned cell phone in the kid’s lap. “On me.”

  “Where’m I going, South Precinct?”

  “Central Booking on Allerton. And don’t forget to dial one before the area code.”

  The kid moved his lips as he punched in the numbers, Heinz grunting, prone to the same dopey habit himself.

  “Yeah, Ray . . .” The kid closed his eyes as he spoke. “It’s me, Salim.”

  But before he could continue, the driver reappeared, thrusting a fist through the open rear window of the cab and socking Salim clumsily but squarely on the temple.

  At three a.m., Heinz awoke from a ninety-minute sober-up in a disused jail cell, came out, washed his face, tucked in his shirt, then began the three-flight trudge from the lowest level of Central Booking to the street.

  One flight up, he passed the nearly deserted bullpen, saw his collar, Salim El-Amin, sitting there behind the bars, lips silently moving as if he were still trying to punch in that phone number. On the bench facing him was the only other detainee, some disheveled but not poorly dressed white kid furiously attempting to blink himself back into a state of sobriety.

  When he finally made it up to the street-level lobby, Heinz turned to the twenty-four-hour bail window, intending to throw a wave to the clerk, but was caught up short by the sight of the lone customer there, the guy quacking like a duck to the retired cop on duty behind the grille.

  “He said five hundred!” the guy sputtered, not quite hostile, more distressed, unsure of how to deal here.

  “Well then, he was blowing smoke,” the clerk said, “because bail hasn’t even been set yet. It’s a felony charge. It’s got to go before a judge in the morning, at which point you deal with the bail unit at the courthouse. But frankly, between you and me and the apple tree, my guess is you’re gonna have to pony up more like five thousand than five hundred, come up with a security for the rest.”

  “Five thousand,” the guy repeated softly.

  He was wearing a knit watch cap beneath which the perimeter of a recently shaved patch of scalp was peeking out; this, combined with a pronounced right-side dragginess, suggested to Heinz either a stroke or a serious tune-up at the hands of another.

  “Gene,” he said to the bail clerk, “five thousand for who, the drunk kid? He looks like he couldn’t boost a Mars Bar.”

  “No, Pete,” the clerk said. “The other, your guy.”

  “Abdul Ben Fazool?”

  “Salim El-Amin,” the civilian corrected him self-consciously, Heinz looking at him with new eyes now; white man, early forties, possibly assaulted in the not too long ago, bailing out a Young Brother at four in the morning . . .

  But although there seemed to be a strong vibration of embarrassment coming off the guy, it didn’t feel quite outwardly focused; more like an internal audit going on than anything concerning judgment by others.

  “I’m Pete Heinz.” He offered his hand. “Maybe I can help.”

  The four a.m. diner was like all diners: gray Formica, dull raspberry padding, either Mylar wallpaper or marble-veined mirrors on every vertical surface. The comatose waiters in mock semiformal wear stood dead-eyed by the cash register, one or two holding Ten Commandment–sized menus and all slightly listing on their heels at this voidish hour.

  “You don’t understand.” Ray spoke to the sugar canister between himself and this red-eyed detective. “This is a very good kid.”

  “Good,” the cop said lightly, then clammed up, his eyes slightly bulging as if he were trying to contain one hell of a guffaw.

  Ray was pretty sure the guy thought his relationship with Salim was sexual, but he didn’t know how to disabuse him of that notion without being the first to bring up the subject.

  “Look. His wife just left him, took the kid, trashed the apartment, his mother’s in the hospital, his father’s wherever, whoever, and Salim, Salim is hanging by a thread.”

  “It’s armed robbery,” the cop said. “The thread snapped.”

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  “You were there?”

  Ray looked off, tried to regroup.

  “What happened to you,” the cop demanded, tilting his chin to Ray’s watch cap.

  “Nothing with him. Listen to me,” holding up both hands, fingers splayed. “I’m not saying he didn’t do time but he’s killing himself out there trying to do the right thing, and he’s an incredibly talented individual. An artist.” Ray flinched as soon as the word was out of his mouth.

  “An artist,” the cop marveled, having a grand old time, his lower face moving now as if he had a mouse in his mouth.

  “Graphic, commercial, illustrative,” Ray forged on, trying to come off vocational rather than bleeding-heart sentimental, but still hating the naive dipshit tone of his own words. “He’s got a portfolio that would knock your eyes out. I mean you should see . . .”

  Ray faded, done in by his own earnestness. “Look, this kid, whatever kind of . . . Whatever I sound like to you, and I can imagine, you know, from your vantage point what that is . . . All I’m saying is this. Salim? If he gets lost in the system, if he falls through the cracks . . . You have no idea of what you’d be burying here.”

  “No doubt,” the cop said evenly, sipping his grayish coffee.

  “OK. Just . . .” Ray scrambled. “He’s got this three-year-old son, Omar, right? I’ve never seen a connection between a father and a child like this. I mean, he’s more a mother to that kid than the real one. And c’mon, you know, coming from where he’s coming from? I mean how many young—”

  “No doubt,” the cop said again.

  “Look, like I said, I know
what I sound like . . .”

  “So what’s he to you, you help him out?”

  “I . . . When I can.”

  “You’re his what, mentor?”

  “Fuck you,” Ray said wearily.

  “Excuse me?” The cop finally swallowed the mouse.

  “There’s nothing sexual about it. I’d say I’m as straight as you are, but I really don’t know you.”

  The cop stared.

  “I used to be his teacher.”

  “No kidding,” the cop said coldly. “What did you teach him?”

  “Most likely not a damn thing, but the subject was language arts.”

  “English? Huh. I always wanted to be a writer.”

  “Back at the bail window, you said maybe you could help.”

  “Yeah, well, technically you could spring the kid tonight if you call a judge at home, get him to set bail over the phone. It’s not unheard of, but I just don’t think this kid’s worth it.”

  “If I say he is . . .”

  “What’s he got over you? You say no sex but then . . .” The cop’s eyes traveled back up to Ray’s damaged crown, Ray reflexively readjusting his watch cap.

  “He came at you too, tonight, didn’t he . . .”

  “Actually,” Ray said, “he didn’t.”

  “You say that like he could have.”

  Ray closed his eyes, took a power nap.

  “Yes?”

  Ray glanced out the diner window at the immobile street.

  “Look.” The cop slowly came forward, elbows on the table. “You say the kid’s got all this talent, all this potential, and I have no reason to disbelieve you. But I have to say . . . If Leonardo da Fucking Vinci came at me with a screwdriver, there’s no way I’m posting his bail.”

  “But he didn’t.” Ray stared at him with ragged determined eyes. “So can you help me here, or not?”

  Two hours later Salim El-Amin was released from the subbasement bullpen of Central Booking, Pete Heinz hanging in to see what would pass between this nitwit and his savior.