Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  “Got it.” I stirred, started to think about leaving. “When does he come out of the cage?”

  “To get the mail,” she said. “The mailman, she don’ going up inside there, so the boy comes down.”

  “What time does that happen?”

  “One-thirty, two o’clock. And at night, somebody comes to take his place. An older man, and the boy goes home.”

  “Have the cops ever busted the place?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Can you tell me anything about El Tuerto? Is he the money man?”

  She shrugged, palms out and up. “Anglo,” she said. “El Jefe, the big boss. Mean. His greed make him look hongry. Think about money alla time. The rest of them are just soldiers.”

  I stood to go, and she rose with me, and that’s when I saw the altar on a corner of her kitchen countertop. Two cold candle stubs and a mostly empty half pint of Old Duke red sat around the plastic statue of a robed woman. Like Klaudia’s, only not as tall. “Is that . . .” I tried to remember what she’d called hers. “Our Lady of something . . .”

  “Charity.” She crossed herself, an unconscious gesture. “How do you know her?”

  “I don’t, really. Tell me about her.”

  “For Catholics, Our Lady of Charity. For the old religion, from the Yoruba, in Africa, she is Oshun. The first woman, become spirit.”

  “Oh. Like Eve, from the Bible.”

  “No, baby, no, not like Eve. Oshun is power, she is the power of the woman, and if you make offense to her she will cut out your heart and eat it.”

  I was willing to bet that an honest man had invented this particular saint. “Thank you, Luisa, you’ve been a great help.” Then I remembered something. “Ogun.” It was the name my assailant had been shouting. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Male spirit,” she said. “Strong, but not too smart. Like most men.” She stood with her chin high, waiting for me to judge her. Pride, and fear, and a little suspicion. “I think so you need more help than I can give. Let me see your hand, one more time.”

  I reached out to her and she felt my palm with her fingertips, as before. “You better be careful,” she said. “I feel trouble, in this hand.”

  NYC was always funny that way, the place felt like it had more Russians than Russia, more Jews than Israel, more Turks than Turkey, more Cubans than Cuba. And when they came to New York they brought more with them than their language and native cuisine. I wondered how much time I really needed to spend learning about African deities, but when the same goddess, or whatever she was, shows up twice in as many days, there had to be a link. Anyway, the bead on the wire shivered again but it didn’t move, because you had El Tuerto the money guy on Mac’s side and you had two more Chinese bad guys on the side of Annabel and the tongs.

  There was not a single person named Tuerto in the Manhattan phone book, with or without the El. Bronx, either.

  Nickname, maybe.

  I remembered that Mac spoke Spanish, so I called him. “Tuerto?” he said. “I don’t think that’s a word. You sure she didn’t say suerto? Means luck.”

  “No. Tuerto, with a T.”

  “Don’t mean nothing to me,” he said. “But Spanish is like that, it’s regional. Might be a local thing. I learned mine on the West Coast, and I don’t think I ever heard the word before. How you doing, anyway? Or shouldn’t I ask.”

  “You ever swindle any Chinese guys?”

  “I don’t remember any.”

  “I’m starting to think Annabel was right and you were wrong.”

  “Never happen,” he said, sounding completely sure of himself. “Keep your eyes on the money, Saul. It’s always the money, believe me.”

  I stared at my reflection in the window of The Gap store. Melanie Wing, my sister. Maybe. A nurse. It takes a special kind of person to be a nurse, misadventures and consequences will acquaint you with nurses, and the hands of a good nurse can have enormous impact on how well you heal and how quickly you walk away. Or even if . . . Wouldn’t that make you a couple of points with the goonas? Probably a better person than me. Made more of a contribution, no question.

  Probably hadn’t stolen many horses.

  So, okay, maybe she wasn’t a saint, not according to one J. Whelen, ex-cop and current private eye, and I had little cause to doubt him. This was his city, his neighborhood, in fact, and I would have to live in it a long, long time before I could read the signs better than he could. And was it so bad anyhow? She’d been a woman, after all, among other things a sexual being. If God had given her a Ferrari, who was I to tell her she couldn’t drive it?

  Please. And if there was a real deity, wouldn’t he, she, or they be disappointed in you if you’d never once in your life gone out and swung from the trees a little bit? Otherwise, why make trees?

  Then it hit me.

  Whelen had given me an out.

  It was perfect.

  What father really wants to hear about his daughter’s sex life? That meant that long and detailed explanations would not be necessary. ‘Mac, this isn’t going to be easy for you to hear . . . A pretty girl all on her own in a big city, hey, these things happen.’ And if that didn’t do the trick I could beat him down with some words out of that book he loved to carry around. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay.’ The guy would get his eventually, and probably in exactly the way Whelen said he would, either he’d slip up and wind up in prison or he’d mess with the wrong lady and catch a knife in the ribs. A girl from a less sheltered background, maybe, one who would think to have a shiv secreted somewhere about her person. Survival of the meanest . . . That was the way these things were supposed to work. Isn’t nature, after all, God’s primary testament?

  Mac would buy it, I wouldn’t even have to sell it to him, he’d do it to himself.

  And then I could go back.

  Really? To what?

  Who was I kidding?

  Shit.

  I could hear the goonas laughing at me.

  Interregnum

  Corey Jackson silently thanked Providence that he happened to have put on loafers that morning because he did not think he could have faced the prospect of bending over to tie his shoes. Aniri would have done it for him, he had no doubt of that, but he was not at all comfortable with that prospect. He was the one that was supposed to be the strong one . . .

  Yeah, he decided, looks like that one’s bullshit.

  “My brother, you think you’re gonna hurl?” the Babalao said.

  “No.” Corey prided himself on his level of physical toughness. I will be damned, he thought, if a single two-dollar cigar is gonna make me puke.

  If that’s all it was.

  “Do we go now?” It was Aniri’s voice, thin and frightened. “What do we do?”

  “Don’t worry, sister,” the Babalao said. “I got you. First we gotta go back into the shop. Take his elbow.” Corey sensed the man up close. He blinked his eyes, trying to bring the world back into focus. “My brother,” the Babalao said. “We’re goin’ in now. Watch the steps. Do you see them steps?”

  “Yeah,” Corey said. “Remind me to pick up a box of those cigars, will you?”

  “Coreee . . .” Aniri sounded like she was freaked.

  The Babalao chuckled. “I know, I know. Twenty bucks for five. But if I used better ones, they’d probably hit you even harder. Here we go. Up the stairs.”

  Back inside the shop, Corey leaned against the counter to steady himself. The Babalao’s assistant absented herself while he puttered around. Corey’s vision slowly began returning to normal; he watched the Babalao dig through a cardboard box and come up with a bottle of Bacardi 151. “Here we go,” the guy said. He handed the bottle to Aniri, who began dusting it off. “That’s not for you, that’s for Oshun,” the Babalao said. “It isn’t a payment, though, and I don’t want you to think of it that way. This is important. It’s not a bribe. It’s a token of your regard.” He peered into Aniri’s eyes. “Do you understand what I�
��m saying? You know her, you know she likes, so you brought. Just like any other old friend. Okay?”

  “Yes,” Aniri said. “But . . .”

  “No buts. This is what seals the deal. So what we’re gonna do, okay, and I’m gonna go with you just to make sure, we’re gonna walk this down to the park. Once we get there, we’re gonna open the bottle and toss it into the river.”

  “Isn’t this expensive?” Aniri said.

  “Certain times,” the Babalao said, “and this is one of them, honey, it don’t pay to go cheap.”

  “Okay,” Aniri said. “And then what happens?”

  The Babalao paused, his mouth wide with amusement. “Well,” he finally said. “That is the question, isn’t it?”

  By the time they got to the end of the first block, Corey was feeling normal enough for his sense of skepticism to return in force. Primitive spirits, he thought. Ghosts, kitchen gods, demons, ghouls, and the night sweats . . . The Western perspective was, no doubt, still the best and most logical explanation. Praying for some kind of help from a spirit, fundamental universal force or not, was a mind fuck at best, a way to shelve your despair for another day, to rally your fading strength and get yourself out there one more time. And at worst it was a cruel trick, a false hope. Better to face reality. If Corey was going to free Aniri from Los Paraíso, he was going to have to break some eggs. Sure, cheap cigars and good rum might be more palatable than sacrificed chickens, but neither approach made much sense to him.

  I should never have let her talk me into this, he thought. But she’d have done it on her own anyhow. The question that troubled him now was, was his presence making her safer or more vulnerable? He’d already been warned away from her twice, first by one of the Chinese pimps and the second time by their Haitian enforcer. The big man had made it clear that there would be no third warning, that if they caught him near her again he’d wind up with a stay in the hospital, or worse. That was the reason he and she usually arranged to meet way uptown, as far from Los Paraíso as they could. To be together this close to the lion’s den was madness.

  Cigars. And you didn’t even get to taste the rum. Really? Corey wanted to spit the vile tobacco taste out of his mouth, but he didn’t have any saliva. Aniri and the Babalao preceded him down the sidewalk. The Babalao touched her softly on the shoulder to indicate where he wanted her to go, and she glanced back at Corey from time to time, beseeching him with her eyes to please just keep it shut and go along. When this doesn’t work, he thought, she’s gonna be heartbroken. He’d been thinking about driving home to South Carolina for a pistol. But, after the inevitable happened, after someone got shot with it, how did you live with a thing like that? And if things went far enough wrong, he might just wind up destroying what slim hopes they had left.

  They crossed Avenue D and walked into the dim courtyards between the buildings of the Jacob Riis projects. Corey felt eyes on him. Paranoia, he thought, listening to the cars roaring past on the FDR Drive. The Babalao steered Aniri north between the buildings, heading for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the roadway and led to the narrow strip of green that lay between the highway and the East River. Corey’s sense of misgiving grew as they crossed, and it continued to get worse as they neared the water. We get through this, he thought, and we are never coming back here, no matter what.

  Lights burned like stars on the far shore, glittering off the uneasy surface of the river. There was a fence right at the seawall that held the river in place, and it had a large man leaning on it. Corey looked back, his stomach sinking when he saw two more guys cross the pedestrian bridge behind them. One of them loitered there, cutting off their escape, the other sauntered closer.

  He was one of the Chinese pimps from Los Paraíso.

  Corey called softly to Aniri. “Babe?”

  The tall guy detached himself from the fence and walked over.

  The Haitian.

  He stopped about ten feet away, looking at Corey, shaking his head in mock sorrow. “This is on you,” he said. “Because you were warned.” A gray-haired guy loomed out of the darkness. Senior management, Corey thought, coming to safeguard his investment. The Haitian nodded to the guy. “You see this man? He is going to punish Aniri. And you are going to watch.” Corey glanced at the guy, saw him flash a sick smile. “And then I am going to hurt you.”

  The Babalao was the first to move. He stepped up and took the bottle from Aniri’s shaking hands. He unscrewed the top, which crackled as it tore loose from its retaining ring. He dropped the cap on the ground and looked at the Haitian. “You should reconsider,” he said.

  The Haitian hesitated, looked at the Babalao, then shook his head. “You can’t help them.”

  “That remains to be seen,” the Babalao said. “But allow me to take care of this one little detail first.” He twisted back and sideways from the waist, wound up and slung the bottle hard, throwing it so that it spun as it arced, silvery rum spraying in wide circles. Corey watched it soar out over the water, which was a mistake, because when he looked back the Haitian was up close, gritting his teeth as he punched Corey in the face.

  Corey tasted blood, felt the dirt of the park against his face. He heard Aniri crying, heard the splash as the bottle hit the water, and then he heard a man screaming. He wondered if it was the Babalao.

  Guy sounded like he’d been skewered . . .

  Chapter Seven

  I stopped at the same bodega, got another cup of that Bustelo coffee. I didn’t think I would survive a steady diet of the stuff, but once in a while, man, when you wanted all your brain cells standing up and paying attention . . .

  The mail carrier made her way up Avenue B, and I went to work on my face. Eyes too wide open, brows up too high on your forehead meant that you were a little too desperate for them to like you. Too many lines on your face, too much tension meant that you were too angry, that you might be working yourself up to something. Nothing at all, that’s what I wanted, no wide eyes, no tension, no nothing. A little resigned fatigue, maybe, but just a little. That would broadcast the message that I didn’t give a fuck one way or the other, and in this momentary role as an inspector for the NYC Department of Buildings, not giving a fuck was exactly right. Got my face, got my pen, got my clipboard with violation forms printed out courtesy of my hotel’s Internet connection, got my attitude, I was ready.

  I crossed the avenue just as the mail carrier turned onto Tenth. When she got to the open doorway to Los Paraíso, she stopped and shouted up the stairs. I thought I probably had her figured, from just that much. West Indian adult female, skirt down to her mid-calf, I figured that made her likely to be a good Christian woman, the USPS might have their regulations but she was not about to put a foot inside a joint like Los Paraíso.

  Good to know some people still had standards.

  As I came up the sidewalk a tall, skinny duck-footed Jewish kid came out for the mail. Probably not yet twenty, the sort of orange hair that would turn brown in time, glasses, wrinkled white shirt, black pants, yarmulke, Hasid curls, premonition of a beard, big black shoes. “Excuse me,” I said. The kid jerked to a stop, the parcel of mail in his hand. “You work here?”

  He nodded. His face looked squeezed, his eyes squinted in an attempt to focus, his features all out of proportion due to the distortion from his glasses. “Yyyee, um, yeee, um, yeah.”

  I took out my pen, held it poised over my violation form. “What’s your name?”

  We had attracted the attention of the gang kids and they all stood expectantly, waiting. “Ahh, Schhh, um, schhh, um . . .”

  “Shmuley!” About half of the kids yelled his name, almost in unison.

  I shook my head and looked down at my form. Minor show of sympathy. “Are they right?”

  “Um, um, um, yeah.”

  “Last name?”

  The gang waited in expectant silence.

  “Gel, um, gel, um . . .”

  “Gelman!” Their harmony was better this time. “Shmuley Gelman!” They dissolv
ed in laughter.

  I glanced over at the kids. They were not afraid of me, but they seemed to sense that their fun was over for the moment. They stood around us in a ragged half circle. Behind them, a car honked. One of the taller kids turned around and held his hands out, palms up as he shrugged, miming a salesman with nothing to sell. “Mr. Gelman, can we do this inside? Do you have an office?”

  He stared at me for a moment, his pained, constipated expression firmly in place. Willing me away, perhaps, but I didn’t go so he nodded, turned, and clomped up the stairs. I followed a few steps behind, feeling as though each step transported me back to a New York City that I hadn’t seen in a long time. There were no smells of cooking in this building, this place was the flip side, this was the last stop before that long slide down into darkness. At the first landing, I watched while Gelman unlocked the door to his iron and glass cubicle.

  The lock was a joke.

  There were two chairs inside, one was an upright wooden office chair behind a desk next to the window to the lobby, and the other was an overstuffed, moth-eaten affair over in a corner, suitable for sleeping. I would have worried about its cockroach population but I didn’t think there was anything in the building for them to eat. I plopped down in the soft chair, which was more comfortable than it looked, and I threw my clipboard on the floor. “Gelman, I need you to listen to me. Okay? I don’t work for the city.”

  He froze.

  “Gelman, turn your chair around so that I can see you. Attaboy. Relax, kid, I’m just here to talk, you got nothing to worry about on my account. I’m not going to hurt you. I work for a branch of the government that you’ve never heard about.”

  “Ah-duh-ah, do you have any ID?” he asked, his eyes squeezed almost shut. He looked like his stomach was killing him.

  “I got all the IDs you want,” I told him, “but they’re all phony. What’s the point?”

  “Wha, ahh, what do I call you.”

  “Saul.”