He takes off his jacket and slings it across his shoulder in the “man of the people” pose he must’ve copped from an old Frank Sinatra album cover. “We’re all whores, you look at it that way. You wanna make a difference? You accept what they call ‘corruption’ in school. Only they don’t tell you that.” He raises his voice and then drops it suddenly. “Steven, you can’t say anything to those Puerto Rican boys just in here that’s gonna change their lives. To change lives, you need resources. You want resources, you buy into the system. You buy into the system, watch out for the prosecutor, my friend.
“See, you may not be doing anything wrong now, Steven, but you’re not doing that much right either.” With that, he puts the jacket under his arm, bows his head, and walks out the door.
23
“THIS IS A GUY who buys his wife a television antenna for an anniversary present,” Richard Silver said.
“You should give him a chance,” his lawyer, Larry McDonald, told him.
The two of them were sitting in a Long Island restaurant called Captain Nemo’s Seafood Bar and Grill. All the wooden chairs had anchors on the back and legs shaped like dock ropes. Live fish tanks were built into the walls and each drink had a plastic swordfish stirrer. The lighting was dim and a little musty, like an underwater grotto. Larry McDonald and Richard Silver kept watching the door to the men’s room.
“He’s been in there a long time,” Richard Silver said. “What’s he doing, writing the Torah?”
“He’s just nervous,” Larry said in his airy singsong voice. “He’s never done anything like this before.”
Larry was not a bad lawyer, but he was no Jimmy Rose. There was something a little off about him. The paleness of his skin, the thinness of his wrists. His habit of sighing and letting his voice trail off. Richard glanced at the men’s room door again as the boy dressed in a first mate’s uniform brought him his tuna fish sandwich.
Richard told the boy to hold the rest of the food until the third man in their party came back to the table. The boy left and Richard shook his head.
“Captain Nemo’s Seafood,” he said. “With Bobby Kennedy I had dinner at ‘21.’ You believe that?”
Larry sighed. “Life is very funny …” his voice trailed off.
“Now, I’m spending July Fourth with a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year bank manager from Syosset. What kind of world is this?”
“I don’t know …”
“Yeah.” Richard turned his eyes to the bathroom once more and then leaned across the table. “Listen, Larry, you sure about this guy? The last thing I need is a pain-in-the-ass federal probe. I already got this probation thing.”
Larry held up his wrists, like he was offering to let Richard slash them. “This is my second cousin. Practically my blood.”
“Then why do I have to be here?”
“He wanted to meet you, Richard. The last time he was in Manhattan, I showed him some of the buildings you put up. He was very impressed.”
Andy Altman finally came out of the bathroom. Richard sized him up all over again. A small-boned man in his early forties, with a boy’s sparse mustache and a few strands of black hair stretched, hopefully and impractically, across an expanse of pink scalp. Sears blazer, purple Izod shirt, cheap loafers. The kind of guy Richard used to beat up for his lunch money and his baseball cards when he was a kid. Taking small steps, Andy returned to the table and sat down between Richard and Larry.
“I’m sorry,” he said shyly. “My stomach’s been bothering me.”
“It’s all right,” Larry said, patting his hand. “We had the waiter hold your food.”
“So, Andy,” Richard said in a low voice. “You thought about what we were saying?”
“Well.” Andy cleared his throat and peered over at the waiter to let him know he wanted his food now. “There were a couple of things I wasn’t quite clear on.”
Richard’s brow furrowed. “What don’t you understand? You have the easy part.”
For the third time, Larry took the napkin with the diagram on it out of his breast pocket. “It’s just like we said before, Andy,” he said in a voice that was just a bit above a whisper, “you hardly have to do anything. When Richard’s friends bring in the deposits, you just don’t fill out the IRS report. Don’t worry about the Cayman Islands. Somebody else will go down there to handle things …”
“Larry, Larry, Larry.” Andy shut his eyes and nodded. “I know how money laundering works.”
“Sssh.” Richard Silver looked like he was about to leap across the table and clamp a hand over Andy’s mouth.
“I understand all that,” Andy said in a softer voice. “What I don’t understand is where Richard’s friends get the money from. Are these Mafia people or something?”
There was a long silence. Richard waited until the waiter put down Andy’s seafood platter and left before he spoke again.
“Why would you wanna know a thing like that?” he said in a quietly intimidating voice.
“I don’t know.” Andy seemed to shrink a little in his seat. “I just wanted to know. I thought it’d help me make my decision.”
“Listen, Andy, when you get an opportunity, you take it. If the men who built Long Island had hesitated, we’d be sitting in a potato field now, instead of this fine restaurant.” Richard looked over at the waiter and tapped his empty Diet Coke glass.
“That’s right,” Larry said. “You never know when something’s going to come along and change your life.”
The waiter brought Richard another Diet Coke while Andy held a skewered shrimp over the flame in the middle of his platter.
“I remember something that happened a few years ago that changed my life,” Larry said, a long gray hair protruding out of his nose. “I had a very powerful client with a lot of friends in what the newspapers call the organized-crime community. Anyway, he was very fond of me and he invited me to a big party at his penthouse on the East Side. And I wanna tell you, it was the wildest thing. He had a swimming pool built into the roof of his penthouse. And when you went downstairs, there was a window so you could watch people swimming from under water. So I looked in, and he had all these naked boys in the pool.”
Richard scratched his head. “You talking about Frank Raggi?”
“This is somebody you don’t know,” Larry said. “Anyway, I went downstairs and I’m watching this. And these boys were like dolphins the way they swam. A lot of the time, they had their heads out of the water, so all you saw were their legs and torsos. But every once in a while, one of them would swim by and take a little nibble at another guy’s cock and balls. It was like the Aqua Show. The most erotic thing I ever saw in my life.”
Richard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “And then what?”
“What do you mean, ‘Then what?’” Larry asked.
“What’d you tell your wife when you got home?”
“I told her I’m a fag.”
“What?” Richard nearly spit out his soda.
“You didn’t know that? I’m gay. Sure. And I never would’ve known it if I hadn’t of gone to that party. That’s what I was saying to Andy here about opportunities.”
“Shit.” Richard sat still for a moment, watching an angelfish eat a baby minnow in a nearby fish tank. “I never knew that about you, Larry.”
“I only brought it up to make the point with Andy. I know it doesn’t have any effect on our relationship.”
“Of course not,” Richard said, covering his mouth with a napkin. “So what do you say, Andy? Are you gonna be with us?”
Andy had done nothing but eat for the last few minutes. His seafood platter, which started off with twelve items, had just two mangled pieces of calamari left. He sat back, rubbing his stomach.
“Could work out, I guess,” he said.
“What’s the problem?” Richard Silver asked.
“The ten percent you were talking about. That only comes to a thousand dollars if I help you wash ten thousand.”
Richard put h
is glass down and looked at Larry again. “So?”
“So,” said Andy, loosening his belt a couple of notches and suddenly sounding more confident. “I was thinking you could probably afford to add on another five percent.”
“I see you already know all about opportunities,” Richard said. “We’ll see about your five percent. That’s more than we were thinking of.”
“Well, at least, throw in dessert tonight,” Andy said. “I think I still feel a little hungry.”
24
I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE’S much I can say to explain why I call Maria Sanchez for a date on the Fourth of July. I guess I could claim that I care so much about my job that it spills over into my personal life. But the truth is that I’m kind of drunk and horny and I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. Besides, it’s the holiday and I’ve got nothing else to do.
My hand shakes a little as I’m dialing her new number, because I know I’m not supposed to be doing this. But I got one drink past my inhibitions a half hour ago and I figure I have to seize the moment now or let it pass forever.
By the second ring, though, I suddenly realize I could be making the mistake of a lifetime and blowing my job on a drunken whim. I’m about to hang up when I hear somebody picking up on the other end and immediately recognize Maria’s voice saying, “Hola.”
Hanging up now would make me feel like I was making a dirty phone call or something. “Yeah, Maria,” I say, fumbling for a cigarette and trying to figure how to get out of what I’m about to get myself into. “How you doing?”
“Mr. Baum,” she says in an excited voice. “I can’t believe it’s you calling.”
“Yeah, neither can I.”
“What are you doing?”
I put the cigarette down and start mashing up my Silly Putty. “Well, I, you know, like to check in on my clients over the holidays. Because, um, they can be really stressful times, you know. So I want to make sure everything’s okay.”
There’s a long pause. I try to think of an excuse to get off the phone right away, like an airplane is about to hit my apartment.
“What are you doing, Mr. Baum?” Maria says in a very calm, deliberate voice.
Panic bounces my heart around like a basketball. She’s on to me, I think. This is the end. On Monday she’ll tell my supervisor, Ms. Lang, that I called her up and asked her out on a date, and then I’ll get fired. And I’ll end up on the street, begging for quarters and trying to sell old copies of Freud on the Unconscious and Penthouse Forum on sidewalk blankets like the scuzzy guys in my neighborhood.
“I told you what I was doing,” I say, backtracking furiously and praying it’s not too late. “I’m just calling all my clients and making sure they’re all okay.”
“No,” Maria says firmly. “I mean, what are you doing tonight?”
I stop and take a deep breath. “Nothing, I guess. What’re you doing?”
“I’m not doing nothing neither.”
The words come out of my mouth without my permission. “So,” I say, “you wanna see some fireworks?”
By ten, we’ve made our way to the Battery Park esplanade in lower Manhattan. Behind us, yuppie couples walk arm in arm and high-rise buildings glitter like too much expensive crystal jammed onto a narrow shelf. Down the river, toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, fireworks deliver a series of shocks to the sky.
Maria is standing right next to me. She smiles and bounces up and down when a particularly colorful rocket scatters over the skyline. The mother-of-pearl smell coming from her keeps me by her side and reminds me I don’t have any real excuse for being here with her.
“Oh, look at that one,” she says. “It’s just like a flower.”
The rocket bursts open right over our heads. It’s red at the center and the petals are blue and it keeps opening wider and wider until it seems like it’s going to take over the whole sky. Only it doesn’t make me think of a flower. It makes me think of pussy. Which just goes to show how long it’s been.
“I’m so glad I came tonight,” she says as the sparks in the sky fade.
“I am too.”
That’s the strange thing. I am glad she came with me. It’s so obviously and so unambiguously wrong that I can’t help being turned on by it. Her hair shines in the promenade lights and her pupils reflect the sparkle of another rocket going off. I find that I can’t keep my eyes off the curve of her lower lip.
“Maria, I wanna ask you something,” I say haltingly.
“Yes, what is it?” There’s something sweetly eager in her voice that breaks my heart and makes me want to take her in my arms right now.
The whiskey haze in my head lifts a little, so that I may more clearly hear the tiny devil I imagine on my right shoulder and that boring harp player on the left. “Maria,” I say. “Do you ever think about our meetings after you leave the office?”
For a moment, her mouth hangs open and though I can’t see the rest of her face in the evening light, I have a feeling she’s blushing. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, of course, Mr. Baum.”
I decide I don’t like it that she keeps calling me Mr. Baum while I’m using her first name. It reminds me of the office, which in turn makes me think of her original crime. And that makes me even more uncomfortable than I was in the first place. So I start mashing up the Silly Putty in my pocket. A green rocket streaks across the sky and fragments in front of the Statue of Liberty. “What do you think about our meetings?” I ask.
“I think about the things you say.” She looks up brightly as though someone was murmuring something exciting in her ear. “I remember everything you tell me.”
I’m feeling that heady rush, like I’m about to either get laid or punched out. The harp player on my shoulder keeps telling me she’s seventeen, but who asked him? “What parts do you remember most?”
She puts her fingers on her lips and looks thoughtful. “I think about how you tell me to work on my typing and to go to the Job Corps interviews …”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. But I mean …” I watch a yellow rocket shoot by and make a wish on it that I sort of hope won’t come true. “Do you think about me?”
“You?” She gives me a smile like a Beach Boys’ song in the dead of winter—a promise of something better ahead. “I think about you always. You’re like one of los angeles guardianes.”
The yellow rocket fizzes out. “What is that?” I say. “A minor league team or something?”
“No,” she laughs. “It’s a guardian angel. You’re my guardian angel.”
A second ago, her guardian angel wanted to stick his tongue down her throat. Now, I’m nodding my head like I know what the hell she’s talking about.
“When I was young,” she says, “and all the bad things happened to me, when my uncle would come to my bed, I always prayed for the guardian angel to come and make everything all right. Because otherwise no one would save me.”
“Uh-huh.” I am now three feet tall and shrinking because of the things I’ve pictured her doing in graphic detail over the past few hours.
“And now I have my guardian angel,” she says, taking my hand and kissing me chastely on the cheek.
“Hey, Maria,” I say, flushing with embarrassment and making sure my fly is still zipped up. “I’m just a regular shmo. You know?”
“I know you won’t let anything bad happen to me,” she says, skipping down the esplanade and looking over her shoulder like she wants me to follow.
I suppose I could chase after her, hoping vainly some spark might strike between us, but I chose to bring her here and as Maria’s guardian angel, I choose to bring her home in a cab which costs $23.75. Then I take the subway back to my neighborhood and stop at the bar on Seventh and Avenue B for two scotch and sodas, a favored drink among disappointed guardian angels, I believe.
25
“WHAT’RE YOU LOOKING FOR?” Bobby “House” Kirk asked.
“Car keys,” said Darryl King.
“For what?”
“Olds
mobile Cutlass Supreme.”
Darryl King rolled Pops Osborn’s body over and checked the left hip pocket. Blood was spreading from the gunshot wound in the back of Pops’s head and staining the white carpet. Eddie Johnson stood in the corner, quivering, with his head tucked into his parka. A bottle rocket went whistling off a rooftop somewhere outside. Darryl told Aaron Williams to stop counting the cash for a minute and look in Sunshine’s pockets for the keys. As Aaron went through the dead West Indian’s clothes, Darryl began to sniff.
“Yo, man, I smell something,” he said.
A thick pile of twenty-dollar bills and a money-counting machine sat on the table by the window, surrounded by containers of Chinese food that Pops had ordered. There was half an egg roll left on a paper plate nearby. Bobby Kirk picked it up and put it in his mouth.
Darryl looked over at the fat key chain Aaron was jangling. “One of these gotta be for Pops’s Cutlass,” Aaron said.
Darryl snatched the keys. Bobby asked him why he wanted them so badly. “That’s my ride,” Darryl said, stuffing the keys along with two vials into his pants pocket. He figured that if his sister and her Jamaican boyfriend, Winston, were going to take over Pops’s business, then he was at least entitled to the car.
“You remember the license number?” Darryl King asked Bobby.
“No, why should I?”
“Then we’re just gonna have to try every Cutlass parked downstairs.”
Bobby threw up his hands angrily and let them fall gently to his side. “Yo, I ain’t with that, man,” he said.
“Fuck you, Bobby,” Darryl said. “Let’s go.”
Aaron said he would stay behind with Eddie Johnson for another minute or two to wipe the place down for any fingerprints and grab any extra guns they could find. They did not have to worry about witnesses. The neighbors already agreed they did not hear the nine rounds of gunfire.
Darryl headed for the door. “My head is going like this,” he said, making a pulsing motion with his hand.
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