by Tyler Knox
Kockroach doesn’t answer. He is jammed into the corner of the car, staring. He smells something coming from Mite, it smells like cat urine, like the breath of a mouse, it smells like fear. Kockroach lets the silence between them grow until Mite can’t help himself from filling it.
“So I went and talked to Sylvie and then to Fallon and this is what I found out. The stuff she’s getting, it’s coming from up north, from Harlem, from Moonstone. How about them kosher dills? There’s no doubtsky aboutsky, Moonstone’s the one what’s ruined a prime piece of real estate like Sylvie.” Mite’s head swivels to look outside the car, at the bleak black landscape on either side of the highway. “Where are we going, Jerry?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer.
“So you gots to tell me what to do about it. Somehow, Moonstone’s slipping it through some tit-face into our territory and taking money out of our pockets. You want I tell what’s happening to the Nonos?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer.
“Where we going, Jerry? I got someplace in the city I got to be. Where you taking me?”
“Did you find out who the tit-face is?” says Kockroach.
“Sure I did,” says Mite. “The tit-face is you.”
Kockroach doesn’t react with surprise, his smile stays broad, his head still, his hands calmly one in the other on his lap.
“Did you tell Fallon?” says Kockroach.
“Nah.”
“Did you tell Abagados?”
“Don’t needs to, he knows already you’re in league with Moonstone without me saying a word. He wants me to prove it is all.”
“Can you?”
“Sures I can.”
“Will you?”
Mite looks again outside the window, at the unfamiliar landscape passing by. “I suppose you’re going to knish me like you done Stanzi.”
“That reminds me,” says Kockroach. “On the way back, Istvan, we need to stop at Kirschner’s.”
“Why wasn’t it enough what we had?” says Mite. “That’s what I don’t understand about you getting messed up with Moonstone. We started with nothing, we ended up as kings. Take your cuts, protect your territory, work with Nemo and the Nonos, roll in the clover. Why wasn’t it enough?”
Kockroach considers Mite’s question. One thing Kockroach has learned in his time among the humans is that all humans lie. They lie to get what they want, they lie because they are afraid, they lie to express the very essence of their humanity. Cats prowl, mice devour, cockroaches scurry, humans lie. Kockroach, therefore, had fully expected Mite to lie, he had planned for it, seen the ribbons of possibility float into the future with each expected falsehood. But Mite has turned the tables by telling him the truth. It is why Mite still beats him at the ritual of chess, his maneuvers are always full of surprises. Kockroach considers how to respond, and decides to battle claw with claw. For the first time since the change he will tell Mite the absolute truth about himself and his plans, and he begins with the biggest truth of all.
“I’m hungry,” says Kockroach.
“Well, there’s the problem right there. You know what you need? You need let me take you out to dinner at Mama Leone’s. Seven courses that will split your belly. If the mama don’t kill your hunger, nothing will.”
“Nothing can. I’m hungry all the time.”
“That’s sad, really. That’s like the saddest thing I ever heard. Don’t you want to be happy?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we all want. The right to happiness, it’s in the Constitution or something. Everyone wants to be happy.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what is it you want, big fellow? Tell me. What?”
“Everything.”
“Well, that ain’t happening. Sometimes you just gots to accept the way things are. I’m small, I’m never going to be big, I accept it. I’m never going to be a swell, I accept it. I’m never going to write one of them thick books, fine. I’m always going to have a boss, I accept it, so it don’t matter who it is so long as I get my cuts. You gots to learn to accept things.”
“I accept my hunger.”
“You should show a little more gratitude to the Nonos. He took us in when we had nothing, gave us responsibility, allowed us to rise. He was the one what okayed the move on Big Johnny. He don’t deserve what you’re doing to him.”
“Why should he be the Nonos?”
“Because that’s the way it is, that’s what he is. He’s the Nonos. Who else but him?”
“Me.”
“You? You’re not even remotely Greek. That Jerzy thing I made up on the spot. You don’t even know what it means to be the Nonos.”
“Everyone feeds him. I want to be fed.”
“Don’t we all. But why you? Why not Nemo, what’s been around longer than both of us, or Stavros, or even me. Everyone’s got to wait their turn to move up. Why the hell do you think you got the right to take over out of turn?”
“The player that knocks over the boss piece wins the ritual.”
“And that’s going to be you?”
“Sweet pea.”
“But we have it cushy as it is. Why you want to risk it all to be top dog?”
“Because I can.”
“I suppose that’s why you’re going to kill me too, because you can. How are you going to do it? You going to crush my throat like you done Stanzi? Or are you going to let Istvan lead me out to one of these deserted woods and put a bullet in my brain. Oh, no answer to that? Well look, I got one request, all right? Two maybe. Two. Don’t let it hurt, please. Just don’t let it hurt. That’s the one I just thought of, but the other, the more important, do me a favor and take care of Celia for me, will you? Will you, Jerry?”
“Sure I will.”
“Thanks. You’re a pal.”
“Palsy.”
“Yeah, you son of a bitch.”
“Don’t you ever think about what the other guy’s feeling, Jerry? Don’t you ever wonder, when you got the moke’s throat in your grip, what’s going through his brain and then feel it as if it’s going through your own?”
Kockroach pauses a moment. The question puzzles him. Of course he considers the matrix of greed and fear that controls his opponents’ actions so that he can plan and plot and gain an advantage. But Mite is asking something different. He tries to remember the most recent moments when he triggered the greatest amount of fear in the humans, Sylvie at the piers, Cooney in his house, Stanzi in the grip of death. In those triumphant moments, did he feel anything that they were feeling, even the least intimation of their emotions?
“No,” he says finally.
“Then you’re lucky. I does. I can’t help it. I looks into their eyes and I feels what they feel.”
“I don’t understand,” says Kockroach.
“Well, yeah, maybe neither does I. This frigging world don’t make no sense.”
“But it does. Perfectly.”
“Go to hell.”
“You see what you want and you take it. Others try to take it for themselves. Whoever is stronger wins. What does not make sense?”
“It ain’t that easy.”
“Sure it is, Mite. It is only you that makes it hard. The world is all beeswax, everything.”
“There’s more to life than business, Boss.”
“Only that something above is ready to squash you flat if you step into the light.”
“That’s the only part I believe, you ask me. But when you’re going after them the way you do, Jesus, I can’t help but suffer for them. And when there’s the screaming, forget about it. It turns out I don’t got the stomach for it. Who would have guessed? It’s ’cause I been there, I guess, on the wrong side of the big boy’s fist. And when finally I’m on the right side, it’s still there, them feelings.”
Kockroach wonders if that is a great weakness or a great strength. It could stay an opponent’s hand at the crucial moment, but it might also be why Mite still beats him at chess.
“The lemon,” says Kockroach.
“Son of a bitch, what don’t you know? Where are we going? I got a right to know. Where?”
“Someplace special for you.”
“You don’t got to be so damn cheery about it. So what do you feel, Jerry? When you got some moke up against the wall and you’re there twisting his arm behind his back and he’s screaming and the arm is snapping, what do you feel then? What?”
“Hunger.”
“Christ, you got it bad, don’t you? You got a tapeworm the size of a snake inside your gut. I almost feel sorry for you, you starving son of a bitch. Why don’t you just frigging eat me instead of killing me.”
“I want to eat the entire city. I want to devour the world.”
“You know what, Jerry, all this time I never realized how crazy you are.”
“You want to know a secret, Mite? I’m not human.”
“Tell me about it.”
Istvan slows the car to a stop. “We’re here, Mr. Blatta,” he says.
Mite’s head swivels quickly to look outside. “What is it? Where are we?”
“Get out, Mite,” says Kockroach.
“Sure, Jerry. Sure. But can you do me a favor and not let Istvan do it to me? It ought to come from you. Can you do that for me, that little thing?”
“Istvan, stay in the car.”
“Sure, Boss.”
“Thanks, Jerry, really. You know, when it comes it ought to have the personal touch, don’t you think. Most of my life it’s been cold, noways reason my death it should be the same.”
“Get out, Mite.”
Mite nods, opens his car door, steps out. Kockroach steps out the other side. Mite is crouched, as if readying himself to be leaped upon, but when his gaze spins crazily around and he sees where he is he stands straight. They are on a street, a suburban street with thick trees hanging over the curbs and houses on either side. There are lights, streetlights, security lights, cars parked in driveways.
“This ain’t no deserted field.”
“No,” says Kockroach.
“I thought you was sending me straight to hell. Where are we?”
“Yonkers.”
“Same difference, then. What are we doing here?”
“Look over there,” says Kockroach, pointing. Mite’s head twists as he follows the direction until his gaze alights on a large white house on the crest of a hill. A light on the post announces the address and a shallow white picket fence surrounds the front of the property.
“This Cooney’s place?”
“It was. Now it’s your place. Cooney signed the deed over to me and I’m signing it over to you.”
“Me? Why?”
“It’s what you want, isn’t it? A place out of the city. A plot of grass. A fence.”
“Stop that, all right? Just stop it. You know too damn much.”
“I don’t understand about the fence, it’s like putting yourself in a cage.”
“I was getting ready to sell you down the river. Why would you do this for me?”
“When I was young, I was left to scuttle for myself. I survived but it was always on my own. I never knew it could be otherwise. And then, after the change, I was a blank in this world.”
“What change?”
“You found me and took me to Abagados and taught me chess. Whatever I have become, it is because of you.”
“You means you weren’t a gangster before this? Is that the change?”
“I was a blank, I did not even know enough to know I was looking for something, but I was. I was looking for you.”
“So if I took you to a garage, you would be some crummy car salesman?”
“Want to buy a Buick?”
“Or if I took you to a fire station, you would be saving lives now instead of taking them?”
“I was a blank.”
“You was a piece of clay and I was your Old Dudley. Oh God, I really stepped in it, didn’t I? I really am damned, ain’t I?”
“We are brothers now, Mite. Our possibilities are intertwined. For me it is so foreign a concept, I wouldn’t even know it existed if there wasn’t a word: we. You want a house with a fence, we want the house, and here it is.”
“What do you want in return?”
“Loyalty. The loyalty of a brother.”
“I never had no brother.”
“I’ve had hundreds, thousands.”
“I won’t even ask. I won’t even frigging ask, you freak. But since you’ve had so many you needs to clue me in. What does that loyalty-of-a-brother crap mean?”
“It means, Mite, I won’t eat you unless I have to.”
Istvan stops the big brown car at Kirschner’s Delicatessen, double-parking in front of the entrance. “The usual?” says Istvan.
“I’ll take care of it,” says Kockroach. “Wait here, both of you.”
“Get me a pastrami,” says Mite. “Funny how thinking you’re getting whacked and then not getting whacked it builds an appetite.”
Mite and Istvan stay in the car as Kockroach steps out, looks around, heads into the store.
“Look who it is,” says the short man behind the counter, his round gray head barely peeking above the white porcelain surface. “Always a treat it is to be seeink you. You want maybe potato or spinach?”
“No knish tonight. They’ve been hard to swallow lately. Give me two pastramis.”
“Don’t tell me. On rye, no mustard, no Russian, nothink but meat.”
“You got it, sweet pea,” says Kockroach before heading to the rear of the store, through a small kitchen, out the swinging back door into an alley. Hunched amidst the Dumpster and cans is a tall man in a beige raincoat, his bony wrists sticking out of the raincoat sleeves.
“I’ve been waiting,” says Albert Gladden, Kockroach’s real estate man.
“That’s your job,” says Kockroach.
“I made the changes you asked for in the deed to the property in Yonkers. As soon as I file the deed, the house becomes his for as long as he lives. Shall I go ahead?”
“Yes. Anything else?”
“An opportunity has arisen. There is a foreclosure on three contiguous brownstones on the East Side. Run-down but worth more than they will get. The price will be high and we’ll have to sell some of the Harlem holdings to secure the financing, but I think it’s a good trade.”
“Do it. Did you bring the keys?”
Gladden hands him a jumble of metal. “This is to the back. Three locks. They think they have the only copies.”
Kockroach tosses the keys in his hand, feeling their heft, seeing the dark ribbons of possibility that flow from them. “Is there insurance on the building?” he says.
“Some, but the building itself is not worth as much as the land so the insurance only covers the cost of demolition in case of a fire.”
“Get more.”
“It doesn’t make—”
“Get more,” says Kockroach. He grips the keys tight in his palm. “If things go bad, I might need to disappear for a while. I want you to continue as you have so far. But I will be back and I will expect an accounting.”
“Of course, Mr. Blatta.”
“Do not disappoint me.”
“Never, Mr. Blatta.”
“How’s the wife?”
“She’s a whore.”
“Lucky you,” says Kockroach.
In the alleyway at the side of an old, crumbling warehouse, Kockroach waits as Mite fiddles with the keys. The alley leads around to a loading dock in the back. The warehouse is dark, only a thin strip of light illuminates the side door, where Mite works the keys into the three locks. He has all three keys inserted, but it is hard to tell whether an individual lock is opened or closed. No matter what combination of turns he applies, the door stays tightly locked. Kockroach stands patient
ly as Mite works.
“What the hell is this place?” says Mite.
“Open the door.”
“I’m trying. You got a flashlight?”