Kockroach

by Tyler Knox

  But this I knew with a searing certainty. That thing what happened with Fallon on the beach, that lowering of the curtain and seeing all the city and the fools within it as nothing but the grist of the world? It was happening. Again and again. It was filling me like a fever. It was only a matter of time afore I started spinning and foaming myself. I needed to make something happen, fast. I needed to get on the train west with Celia, fast. I needed to take hold of her love and clutch it like a sword and swing with all my might and separate old Hubert from his head, and I had to do it fast. Because I was losing it, losing it, I was losing it.

  “Anything that is different,” had said the Nonos, “anything that is wrong.” I crisscrossed the Square looking for something what didn’t make no sense to me, I asked whoever would stand still for the asking, and then the something, it hit me like a punch in the face.

  I didn’t let Istvan take me. He had been showing up every afternoon at my hotel waiting to whisk me to wherever it was I wanted to whisk, but I didn’t want to go where I had to go with him. I let him take me on my rounds and then, with him waiting in the street, it was in the front of Toots’s joint, around the big round bar, out through the kitchen, into a taxi afore being let off in the middle of a wide deserted street smelling of blood.

  A fog was rolling off the Hudson, a sickly mist. And I walked right into it, turning right then left, crossing a wide cobbled street.

  It took me a while to find her, them piers they was one just like the next, hard to tell apart, and telling apart the girls what inhabited them was even harder, each a scabrous spider, clinging precariously to her collapsing web. In the cloaking mist I wrongly approached two strange creatures what grabbed at me like I was a last pitiful hope until I broke away.

  But eventually I found the right pier. I stood under the single light and observed a peculiar shadow at the river’s edge. An irregular shadow, moving about in slow motion with a steady skritch heard just over the lapping of the water, an inhuman skritch skritch, evidence of some readjustment of finances and fluids.

  “Come to check on me, Mite?” she said after half the shadow had scuffled off and she had slipped back into the dim cone of light. “Come to make sure I’m not taking too many coffee breaks?”

  “How you doing there, Sylvie?” I said, but I didn’t need no answer from her.

  She seemed as if she was in the middle of some great fever, bone skinny, shivering and sweating both, her swollen hands shaking at her sides. Her skirt was ragged and filthy, her blouse torn, a long scab darted across her neck. Dirt was streaked on her leg, her forehead, so that she blended into them shadows like a ghost.

  “Spend a night here,” she said, “in this fog that soaks through to the bone, and see how you hold up. Got a cigarette?”

  “Sorry. Gum?”

  “Thanks for nothing. What, did Jerry send you to tell me something? Does he even still know I’m alive? Does he care?”

  “Sure he does.”

  “Tell the creep if he wants to send a message he knows where to find me. All right, let me have a stick.”

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out a Doublemint, watched her unwrap the foil. The boards creaked beneath our feets, some ship offshore, hidden in the fog, belched its horn.

  “And this, after all I did for him,” she said. “I was the one who spread the word about him to the other girls. I taught him to dance.”

  “Is that true, Syl?”

  “Sure. One night at the Latin Club, after he took over for Johnny. My feet were aching for days after, the way he stepped all over them. I was his first girlfriend in New York, did you know that?”

  “That I knew. Don’t you remember? I was the one what paid.”

  “Don’t be a silly goose, Mite. I did it for free. It wasn’t ever business with him. Oh Jerry, Jerry and me, we had something, don’t you remember? We had something real, at least before I got sick. That’s the problem, that’s why he put me on the piers. But I can’t get better out here, it just makes me sicker, the fog, the type of clientele. You don’t get the sweet married men from Chicago down here. I told him, let me go back to Pittsburgh and get healthy. I got a sister there, a married sister. I told him, let me go back and I’ll return, better than ever.”

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out my roll, peeled off more than enough. “Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s your ticket to Pittsburgh. The Boss, he wants you to go, to get well. But you gots to go now, tonight, run up to the terminal and leave right away while still you can and not say nothing to no one.”

  “Is that what Jerry wants? He wants me to get well?”

  “Sure he does. You always been his favorite, Syl.”

  “Still?”

  “Sure. Go to your sister, she’ll take care of you.”

  She looked at the money for a moment afore grabbing at it and stuffing it under her dress, into the top of her stocking.

  “It will be grand back in Pittsburgh,” she said. “I was a queen there. You know, my sister, she was always jealous of me. I was the one that had the way with the boys. She didn’t invite me to her wedding, afraid I’d steal the groom. Won’t it be something when I go back, won’t it be a stir. She better hold tight to her man, my sister, that jealous witch, yes she better.”

  “So tell me something, Sylvie. After what Blatta he done to that Turkish bastard what was supplying Christine, remember her, after that everyone knowed not to supply any flea powder to our girls.”

  “Course they knew. No one crosses Jerry.”

  “Not thems that’s smart, anyway. So, Sylvie, the question I gots, the question what’s suddenly been racking my noggin, is this: Who is it who’s been selling to you?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have the least idea what you are talking about.”

  “Come down off it, Syl. The world can tell you’re smacked back just by looking at you.”

  “Did Jerry say something? Jerry told you, didn’t he? And you acting like you don’t know, like you don’t know when you know everything about everything. What are you playing at, Mite? What’s the game?”

  I stared at her for a moment, at her reddened nose, her twitching mouth, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at me, and then I knowed, and then I knowed, just like I knowed that she was never going back to Pennsylvania.

  “Let me see what the Boss gave you,” I said, and she did.

  I found him at the Paddock, hard by the Winter Garden, sitting in a back booth in the back room, his hat on and his jaw hanging, a cigar in one hand, a gin in the other, a near-naked broad shimmying in his lap. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice.

  “Got a minute, Lieutenant?”

  “What does it look like, dick-for-brains?”

  “It looks like your head’s about to explode.”

  His smile was wide and scary, near insane, his face was enveloped by smoke, and just then indeed it looked as if he would burst in flames like an earthbound Hindenburg. Fallon was so open in his vices, so damn joyful, that I suppose for him they wasn’t vices at all. He didn’t feel embarrassed or degraded by them, they was simply worldly pleasures what made life something other than a wait for death. But there was one thing, one need that did embarrass him with its dark power, one secret desire which just then, clever little me, I was beginning to suspect.

  Fallon slapped the bare thigh of the girl what was kneeling astride him and she squealed and pinched his cheek and hiked a leg over his lap so as to slide off the seat and leave us alone in the booth. He watched her go with a sweet regret on his ugly mug and then turned that mug on me.

  “What’s the agenda, Brenda?”

  “I’ve been asking around. I ain’t got nothing firm yet.”

  “And I haven’t cracked a little pissant’s head yet. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Not yet.”

  He leaned over and rapped his knuckle into my noggin, loosing a sharp spot of pain. “You are a cute one. You could make some real scratch cruising
the Square in a pair a tight jeans and a T-shirt, playing at being a juvenile.”

  “That ain’t my game.”

  “Mite, you don’t know your game.”

  “I got a question for you, Lieutenant.”

  “I don’t need questions, I got questions up and down my dick. What I need is answers.”

  Without responding, I reached into my jacket and pulled out the little wax-paper bundle with red thread I got from Sylvie and tossed it onto the middle of the table. It sat there, small and delicate, like a little ornament designed to hang from a Christmas tree.

  “I could run you for possession right now,” he said slowly.

  “I found this on one of our girls. I needs to know who it came from.”

  “One of your girls? Which one?”

  “That don’t matter.”

  “The one you been with at ‘21,’ the one with the bum leg?”

  “Shut up, she ain’t nothing to do with this, nothing to do with nothing. Leave her out of it.”

  “She isn’t one of your girls?”

  “That’s what I said. She’s pure civilian.”

  “Not so pure as you might think.”

  “Don’t even start, you scum bastard.”

  He grabbed my tie, pulled it toward him until I was out of my seat, bent over the table, my face inches from the smoldering tip of his cigar.

  “It’s Lieutenant Scum Bastard to you, Mite. Don’t be forgetting your place.”

  He let go. I slid back across the table and pooled down to the seat as if my backbone had just been neatly extracted with a filet knife.

  “I’ll take this,” he said, swiping the ornament from the center of the table, dropping it into his jacket pocket. “This is the part of my job that gives the most satisfaction, taking poison like this off the street.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a nice home for it.”

  “Johnny Broderick, that cop I told you about, he was once looking to nab a pimp like you. He got word the sucker was eating dinner in the Automat. Broderick strolled in, took a sugar bowl, whacked the pimp in the head, and then, over his collapsed carcass, he said, ‘Case closed.’ Johnny Broderick. In his off hours he was Dempsey’s bodyguard. They made a movie about him. Edward G. Robinson. Johnny Broderick.”

  It happened right on cue, Fallon started talking about Johnny Broderick and suddenly the curtain it dropped and everything went nameless and strange on me again. What was this thing sitting across from me? Best I could tell it seemed to be made of cement, with granite lips and asphalt eyes, some great yet jolly creature built with the bones of the earth. And it was talking to me, this thing what had no name and no meaning, talking to me in a voice as deep as the Grand Canyon.

  “You keep playing your game, holding out,” came the canyon voice out of them gray stone lips, “and I’m going to close the case on you. Time to come clean.”

  I sat there, trying to blink it away like I done before, but it wouldn’t disappear, this thing in front of me. I closed my eyes for a longer time and opened them again, but it was still there, the cement creature with the granite lips and Hubert’s voice.

  “Suddenly you don’t look so good, Mite. You look like you’re about to lay a puddle right here on the table. Just keep it the hell away from my suit, it’s not even shiny yet.”

  The cement creature leaned forward, waved a burning tree trunk in the air.

  “Go outside and what do you see?” it said. “Sucker bait over every last surface. Signs selling liquor, magazines, movies and televisions, selling sex even, if you can read between the neon. God bless Artcraft. It’s the new age, Mite, everything is marketing now. Pretty soon we’ll be billboards ourselves, with signs on our hats and shoes.”

  I closed my eyes to the cement man, just listened to his words, and slowly, gradually, like a lifting fog, the voice lightened and the meanings came clear.

  “They call it Waxy Red on the street, or Wacky Red, depending. The thread is the key, the thread is the sign they ask for. Prime quality, expensive as far as horse goes. For junkies who know enough to demand the very best. You can always count on J. Jackie Moonstone to have the fiercest stuff in the city and to know the power of a label.”

  I opened them suddenly, my eyes, and he was back, Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, no longer cement and stone and asphalt, but a man, a cop with a name and a purpose in life which unbeknownst to him was about to reach a glorious fulfillment.

  “Now agitate the gravel,” he said, “and don’t come back till you have something to tell me about what’s going on.”

  I did as he said, I hustled out of there fast as I could hustle. Time, it was running out on me, it was running out, it was almost gone, and I was almost lost. But I had my answer now. Wasn’t I the little detective? I had my answer and I knew where it would lead. Betrayal first, sure. But then west, the golden West.

  And in my pocket, to keep up my courage, I had that lemon too, the very symbol of my future, though by now it was bruised, soft and spongy, by now its scent was no longer so sweet but had taken on the bitter aroma of decay.

  14

  Within the hard brown exterior of the Lincoln, wedged in a corner of the backseat, Kockroach feels safer than anywhere else in his new world. As the Lincoln cruises the streets of the city, dodging lane to lane, moving shoulder to shoulder with other cars and trucks, twisting down side streets, turning, stopping, starting, stopping again, as the car transports him through the city in a familiar rhythm, he comes closest to recovering the old sensations: comfort in his skin, purpose, community, the great fear of something coming from above to squash him flat. That is why he sits always in the rear seat’s corner, jammed as tight against the door as he can manage, one eye looking out, one eye looking up.

  The Lincoln now is double-parked across Broadway from a small, narrow bar called the Paddock. Cars are honking angrily as they stream past but Istvan, in the front seat, doesn’t so much as twitch at the hostile sounds. The Paddock is one of Fallon’s places, Fallon, whom Kockroach knows to be an enemy.

  Kockroach does not have a subtle system of classification. He wants, he fears, those are his twin guiding lights, and when he applies that simple matrix to the humans who surround him, he places them into one of two distinct categories, friend and enemy. A friend is someone who feeds his greed without feeding his fear: Istvan, his prostitutes, Mite—at least Mite before all the questions. An enemy is someone who feeds his fear without feeding his greed: Rocco Stanzi.

  Then there are those who feed both his fear and his greed, who supply him with the material things he craves but also nurture the dread that gnaws at his liver with the constant hunger of an arthropod. These others, these in the middle, might give a human some pause, but not Kockroach. They too are enemies, fear is that strongly embedded in the cockroach emotional DNA, enemies to be used as long as possible and then destroyed. Abagados is such an enemy, as is J. Jackie Moonstone, as is Fallon.

  Yes, Fallon keeps the Square calm and for a small price allows Kockroach’s collections to go unimpeded, but there is something in Fallon that Kockroach doesn’t trust, some streak of angry honor that Kockroach believes Fallon will one day turn against him, and so Fallon feeds the fear. And now, from a bartender at the Paddock who is paid to keep tabs on the scum with whom Fallon meets each night, Kockroach has learned that the scum with whom Fallon is meeting this night is Mite.

  Mite steps out of the Paddock, hikes up his pants, tilts down his fedora to cover his eyes, looks left and right, slips into the pharmacy next door.

  “Pick him up,” says Kockroach.

  Istvan pulls the Lincoln in front of a green Oldsmobile, speeds across two lanes, cutting off a Checker cab, makes a fast U-turn, and stops with a squeal and a jerk in front of the drugstore. When Mite exits with a pack of chewing gum, Istvan is outside, holding open the car door. Mite is unwrapping the foil on one of the sticks when he looks up and sees Istvan, the car, the open door. His jaw drops.

  Mite takes a hesitant step for
ward, peers into the car. “What’s the word, Boss?”

  “The word,” says Kockroach from inside, “is Fallon.”

  “I had a question for Fallon, is all,” says Mite, sitting now in the backseat as the brown car cruises north, headed out of the city. “Where are we going?”

  Kockroach doesn’t answer.

  “It was something what was happening with Sylvie. After what you done to the Turk what was doping up Christine, I didn’t expect no one would be such a stupid tit-face as to be selling to our girls. But someone was, see, it was obvious with her. So I figured it was good business to find out who. Whoever it was we needed to do something about it, don’t you think?”