The baby was due to arrive in February, and it was November and we were walking to school—PS 29—when my mother fell down on the sidewalk. She didn’t trip, she just sank slowly, her knees giving way. She moaned loudly. I must have been terrified, but I don’t remember that part. Neighbors saw us and ran to help. Someone called my father. After the ambulance left, he took me to school.
My mother never came home. Just before Christmas, they let me come visit her. Not in the ward, though. They wheeled her on her bed through big double doors and Pop and I were sitting on a hard bench against the wall and I just remember seeing tubes and machines with blinking lights and this little woman with lank hair who held my hand.
By then we knew that the baby had been a girl and that she wasn’t coming home. I wasn’t going to have a sister. Just as well; I’m sure I would have blamed her. Hated her.
I don’t remember my father telling me that my mother wasn’t coming home. I don’t remember a funeral. I’m sure he did and that there was one and I was there, but I don’t remember.
Pop and I sat together on the bed and stared out at the half-moon setting over the Bronx.
“She wasn’t much of a wife or a mother, but I don’t think she was a bad person. A sad person, maybe.”
I stifled my shocked reaction, realizing in the moment that he was still talking about Angie, not his wife, my mother.
“Yeah,” I finally forced out around the sob caught in my throat.
“You deserved better.”
“I made my choice. It wasn’t her fault. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.” Talking about Angie, or not talking about my mother, the words came easier. “Well, maybe I didn’t know. She was many things.”
“Your son deserved better.”
“He needed better, that’s for sure.”
Pop didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Did you talk to Skeli?”
I nodded. “She called.”
He nodded. “I like her.”
I nodded some more. “Me, too. So does the Kid.”
“You were six. Like him, I mean. Just six.”
My throat started tightening up again. “Uh-huh.” I cleared it. “He’ll recover. Right now I don’t think he knows. And if he knew, I don’t know that he would care.”
“Hmm.” He meant he wasn’t buying that, but he wasn’t going to dispute it, either.
“If anything happened to me . . .” I stopped, choked by a rush of conflicting emotions, not least of which was fear.
Pop didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he cleared his throat roughly and just said, “Shhh. Shhh.”
So, we sat in what was supposed to have been my sister’s room until the moon was down and we grieved, together and alone, for wives and mothers, and daughters and sisters, we had never known. I didn’t cry. Pop did. Silent tears. Just a few. After a while he squeezed my hand and said, “You know something, son. You’re not an idiot.”
“Thanks.” I gave him the smile he wanted.
“I need to go back downstairs and close up. And see if your buddy is protecting my interests.”
“He’s cheap, rude, and an almost constant whiner. But I trust him.”
“Then so do I.” He smiled. “And something else. You’re a good dad.”
“I learned from the best, Pop.”
| 38 |
I knew exactly what I had to do to ensure the Kid’s safety—and mine. There would be some risk, and I would have to bend the truth into Möbius-strip shapes at times, but if everyone, including me, played our parts correctly, it would all be wrapped up by Sunday night.
The first player I needed to coax into cooperation was Castillo. If he didn’t buy into my plan, nothing else mattered and I might as well accept Brady’s offer and sign myself and the Kid into witness protection. Also, I needed Castillo to hold the cartel’s gunmen at bay for another twenty-four hours.
We had the library at the Merchants and Traders Club to ourselves at 8:30 on Saturday morning. I could smell the coffee brewing somewhere nearby, and the newspapers were all laid out and waiting, but the chairs were empty. The same retainer took our beverage requests again—coffee for me, and water for Castillo, this time. Neither Castillo nor I spoke to each other until the entire ritual was complete.
“I am very sorry to hear of your loss,” Castillo finally began. “Violence and intimidation are no part of my business. Some of my business contacts, however, are not so disciplined. I regret that. But I must insist, I had no part in the death of your wife.”
“Cut the shit,” I said. I waved away his protestations. “Ex-wife. And we both know she wasn’t the target. Your fucking friends tried to kill my son.”
“They were not my friends, nor do I control these people. I am a banker, not a gangster.”
“I’m not wired, so save the not-guilty crap for someone who cares. I have something you want. Something you need. If those assholes had been patient for another few hours, they’d still be alive and so would the mother of my son. And everybody would be happy.”
“You have the bonds?” Relief. Perfect, it would help blind him.
I nodded. “Yes, I have the bonds. One hundred million in Honduran government bearer bonds. The coupons are intact back to last fall. Prior to that, I think Biondi was skimming them for himself. At seven percent, he was taking three and a half mil to the bank every six months. Money your people would probably not even miss. Am I right?”
He couldn’t deny it, so he blinked.
“I would guess that’s why he was stalling,” I continued. “With Von Becker in jail, he had a good excuse for not handing over your bonds. If he’d been able to hold out for another six weeks, he would have been able to skim another three and a half mil. Not bad.”
“Where is that money now?” His clients might not miss the interest on one hundred million dollars, but he and I worked for a living. We’d gladly pick it up and put it in our pocket if we thought we could get away with it.
I shrugged. “The question doesn’t interest me.”
He nodded. He was sure I had it.
I sipped my coffee. It was good—strong and acid. My body needed it—it had been a short night.
“So, where do we stand?” he finally said. Ready to negotiate already. Once the pieces are in place, the mark has to take the initiative or the play just won’t work.
“This is what I want. And, please don’t bother to make a counteroffer. I’d just as soon burn the damn paper and tell my story to the Feds.”
“I don’t think that would be wise.” He was right, he was a banker, not a gangster. Even his threats sounded like a banker’s.
“Don’t threaten, Castillo. Your drug friends have pushed and it has not worked. Right now they’re down three and no closer to getting what they want. It’s time to try things my way for a change.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Need an incentive? Think what happens to you if you fail to get them their money.” He would be dead or in hiding for the rest of his life.
“I’m listening.”
“Good. First, my finder’s fee. One million in cash. I want a suitcase full of used twenties.”
“That is a big suitcase,” he said.
“Buy two.”
“Is this the price you put on your ex-wife? One million dollars.”
“My ex was a pain in the ass, but she died protecting our son, so shut up and listen.” The library sucked up sound like a vacuum. All of those thousands and thousands of unread books sucking up secrets for the last hundred years and no one would ever know. We weren’t loud, but if anyone had been trying to listen from more than ten feet away, he wouldn’t have heard a thing. “My second demand, and it is no more negotiable than the first, is that I want ten kilos of prime, uncut China White.”
Castillo laughed a
nd threw up his hands. “Impossible. For I don’t know how many reasons. Again, Mr. Stafford, I must remind you—I am a banker. I don’t transport heroin.”
“You can get it.”
“What do you want with it? It will be harder to convert to cash than your bearer bonds.”
“No, it won’t. With a million dollars’ worth of that shit hidden away, I get to control Binks. I can undersell you and anyone else who might try to buy him. The power shifts to me.” I needed him to buy into this, even more than the first demand.
Castillo looked, for the first time, just a bit uncomfortable, but he tried for a bluff. “Binks? The Von Becker son?”
I almost laughed, the bluff was so bad. “Binks is your conduit. He does the trades through his foreign exchange book. They look like legit trades, but they’re really just money laundering for you and your clients. The only reason the Feds haven’t discovered the pattern yet is that the drug enforcement guys are working separately from the financial fraud guys. The minute I tell them where to look, Binks is toast. You, too. He’s also your ears. He’s the one who told you I was working for the family, and he’s kept you posted on my progress ever since.”
“So, I am paying for revenge for your ex-wife, a finder’s fee for the bonds, and a bribe for your silence. Anything else?”
“We haven’t covered the revenge part yet.”
“There are three young men dead already. What more do you want?”
“I want their captain. The little guy. I want him delivered, hands tied, with a hood over his head. Alive. I plan on being there when he dies.”
I had surprised him. He assumed that I was as crooked as he, while nowhere near as smart, but he was not vicious and did not expect to find it in me. “You don’t know what you are asking. I don’t control the situation.”
“They’ll go for it. You just have to sell it right. Uno más mestizo muerte. Why would they give a shit?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Why do you keep acting like we’re negotiating? What part of this message are you not getting? This is how it will be or fuck yaz all. Do you think I give a rat’s ass about your management problems at this point? You tried to KILL MY SON!”
The portraits on the far wall all gave me disapproving stares for raising my voice, but then that was what they always looked like. There was no one else to hear me. Castillo heard me, and that was what mattered.
“One million dollars, ten kilos of heroin, and the life of one more minor Honduran drug dealer. Are we done?”
“No,” I said. “I want my briefcase back.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want my briefcase. The one your people stole at the airport.”
“Now you have lost me.”
He was telling the truth. I could feel it. That sent me thinking again about the other possibilities.
“Fine,” I said. “Then the briefcase is negotiable. You see, I’m not entirely unreasonable.”
“When do I get back to you on your demands?”
“You don’t. You show up tomorrow morning. Six a.m. If you’re not there by six-thirty, I call the FBI and start lighting matches.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t start!” I handed him a prepaid cell phone. “At exactly five a.m., I will text you an address. You will have plenty of time to get there by six. Bring the little guy all gift-wrapped, the two suitcases, and no more than two other guys to help carry the load. I can’t expect you to do it all by yourself.”
“And what guarantees do I have?”
“What guarantees do any of us have, señor? Life is like that sometimes, and if you move quickly and decisively, sometimes you get what you want. You have my word, I will have no more than two people of my own there.”
“Will one of them be the shooter from yesterday? There are people who will want to stand up to him. It could make for problems.”
“Play things straight and you won’t even see my people. Fuck it up and take the consequences. Things didn’t work out so good for your guys last time. You don’t want to be in the middle of a firefight any more than I do, so just take care of it.”
I got up and walked out. There was something truly delicious about being the bad guy, the heavy. I could see how some people got used to it.
| 39 |
Four-thirty on a Sunday morning is an awkward time in the city that never sleeps. A lot of people are sleeping. Who’s up? Bakers and ravers, after-hours bartenders and newspaper delivery drivers. Long-legged girls in heels and short dresses, finally heading home. The first cabs of the day are gassing up on the West Side. In late June in New York, the sun is not yet rising, but the sky has gone from black to gray. Out in College Point, the hum from the Whitestone Expressway is about as quiet as it will ever get. The Boulevard won’t start waking up until the bells at Saint Fidelis start ringing for early Mass.
I woke up on neither New York time nor Zurich time, stuck somewhere in between, hungover from jet lag and anxiety. A dull headache cowered at the edge of my awareness, not quite ready to announce itself. I shuffled to the bathroom and swallowed two ibuprofen and a palmful of tap water. I wanted to go back to bed and sleep until Monday. Or Tuesday. Any day but Sunday.
Ivan the Second, as I had come to think of him, was sitting in a straight-backed chair, propping open the front door with his foot, where he would be able to hear any sound from the outside door downstairs. A large black automatic pistol was in his lap. He looked up from his iPad, nodded, and went back to his Angry Birds game.
“Coffee?” I asked—some words are universal.
He looked up and nodded again.
I found the can of Chock full o’Nuts behind the bottle of grapefruit juice—my father’s chosen medium for his daily dosages of Metamucil—and started a pot, adding an extra dollop of ground beans to the mix. A little jump start to the day.
I went down the hall and stuck my head in the door of my old bedroom. Roger was curled up across the foot of the bed, the Kid stretched out up at the head. There was plenty of room for both of them. Seeing the two of them laid out so near, I realized that the Kid was growing. He was so slight it was easy not to notice unless I had to buy him clothes.
Roger would be down for hours yet—he had helped my father close the bar again. The Kid might sleep for another hour or two.
Tom was pouring himself a cup of coffee when I got back to the kitchen. We nodded a silent greeting. I brought Ivan a cup, took one for myself, and settled down across the table from Tom. We drank coffee and stared past each other until the cups were empty.
I checked my watch. “Time.”
Tom nodded.
I took out another prepaid cell phone, texted the cross streets in Willets Point, and shut it down.
We had been over it often enough the night before. We both knew what was next. Ivan got up and went out onto the landing. Tom took up position by the door. From those points, they commanded the narrow staircase down to the street. It was as close to an impregnable position as you could ask for. Anyone coming up the stairs would have to face crossfire from protected positions. With enough ammunition, those two would be able to hold off a small army—maybe even a medium-sized one. I was putting my head in the lion’s mouth, but I knew the Kid and my father would be safe. And Roger, though I was sure he was too nasty to get hurt.
I wanted someone to wish me luck. I wanted to wish them luck. But if everyone stuck to the plan, we wouldn’t need luck. But it never hurts. “I’ll be back,” I said and walked down the stairs.
Willets Point should have been redeveloped decades ago, but the area has resisted the threats of real estate tycoons, sports magnates, and multiple mayors. It was a ten-minute drive away, but I planned on being in position early.
In the center of Queens there is a series of parks bounded by, and bisected at times, by highways, from Jackie Robinson
Parkway at the southern end to the Whitestone Expressway and Northern Boulevard to the north. There are lakes, museums, the Pavilion—a monument to the 1964 World’s Fair—two tennis stadiums, and the new Mets stadium, Citi Field.
And across 126th Street from the brand-new baseball stadium, tucked up into one quiet corner of this expanse of beauty dedicated to the leisure activities of working/middle-class Queens, is a triangle of streets called Willets Point, ten or so square blocks of barely standing one-story enclosures—to call them buildings would greatly inflate their nature—and hundreds of businesses all dedicated solely to deeply discounted automobile repair.
The streets had not been repaired or resurfaced in at least fifty years and the potholes were a challenge to negotiate in anything smaller than a full-sized tow truck. In one sense, the whole area was a testament to the American entrepreneurial spirit, and also to our immigrant heritage, as nowhere else in the five boroughs of New York City looks so much like the mini-industrial blight of a third-world country. This was not where you would come to get your Ferrari tuned.
Sunday morning at 5:30 it was close to a ghost town, the doors and gates all padlocked, the nearly non-navigable streets empty. It had rained briefly in the night and many of the potholes held brown ponds of iridescent water, shimmering with the slick of petroleum products.
I positioned the rental car in the middle of the intersection, turned off the engine, and got out. A guard dog nearby heard the door slam and began a frenzied mad barking, warning me off the treasure he protected—a yard full of retread tires, used hubcaps, and rusting wheel rims. Another dog answered farther up the block, then another and another, and for a brief minute Willets Point sounded almost alive. Then, one by one, the dogs grew bored and settled back into sullen silence. The only sound was the occasional hum of traffic on the Whitestone.
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