by Norman Green
“Okay. Say someone in either organization had a kink of some sort. A problem dealing with women, for example . . .”
“Violent, you mean. Toward women in general?”
I nodded.
“Long term,” she said, “I’d say that man’s prospects for survival would be very poor. Maybe if he kept it quiet, and buried . . .” She thought about it some, then shook her head. “These are very traditional men, Mr. Fowler. Very conservative. They frown on individuality. I can’t see them tolerating much of that sort of deviant behavior in the ranks. And if a body turned up? Publicly? Forget it.”
“Okay. Last question. Any outsiders in the ranks?”
She just shook her head.
“You couldn’t picture any of these guys working side by side with someone from, say, Mexico?” Or Haiti . . .
“Never. Do business, sure. But work together? On the same team? Not on your life.”
Disappointing, to say the least. “But they would have no problem working with a crooked cop.”
“Of course not,” she said, grinning. “Where you been?”
I grinned back, thinking of the tree I was about to shake.
The building was not far from the Whitestone Expressway, it was mixed in with the junkyards, chop shops, and taxi garages of Willets Point. It was a bus garage, a big empty barn of a building with a fenced-in parking lot out behind. I watched it for hours, sitting in a few different vantage points. No one seemed to pay me the slightest attention. I was, it seemed, the only unemployed person hanging around, everyone else was busy, nobody looked like they had any time to contemplate me or what I was doing. Late in the afternoon, when the buses started coming back to the garage, I decided I’d waited long enough.
The first driver I approached was around forty, looked more or less like a guy who sat on his ass for a living. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, walking up to the guy as he headed up the sidewalk, away from the garage. “I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute.”
“What?” the guy said, guarded. “I ain’t buying nothing.”
“I’m not selling anything. Do you work for the bus company?”
“No,” he said, “I just went in there to use the men’s room. Take a hike, buddy.” The guy turned his back on me, walked up the hill, got into a car and drove away.
I tried again a few minutes later, I walked up to a thin, gray-haired white guy but he just ignored my questions and walked away. A third guy did exactly the same thing. Funny, I thought, when none of the guys working at a place want to bash the management. It ain’t natural.
An ancient, bald-headed Chinese guy came out of the building carrying a push broom. It was an open question whether he was holding up the broom or vice versa. I watched him sweep the sidewalk and driveway in front of the building. I kept trying, approaching the bus drivers as they headed out for home, and I got nowhere. I finally got a response of more than two sentences; it came from a stocky middle-aged black guy who looked like he could be bad news if you pushed him too far.
“You a reporter?” the guy demanded. “You tryina dig up some dirt? You barkin’ up the wrong tree. You don’t like gooks, that what ya problem is? Lemme tell ya somethin’, asshole, them are good people up in there. Lemme see you try ta get a decent job when ya got a coupla felonies on ya sheet. Don’t matter none, you got ya GED and ya CDL, ya kissed ya parole officer’s twat fa two fuckin’ years and ya go ta church every muthafuckin’ Sunday, okay, let’s see you find a gig where ya make more than minimum. Okay? So fuck you. Them are good people in there, they know how ta treat a man like a man. So tell ya story walkin’.”
I liked him. Good to see a guy with some backbone, a guy who knew the meaning of loyalty. Still, I found the whole thing perplexing, on two levels. First, it was odd that not one of the guys I tried to talk to would bitch about his job, and second, I had really expected a couple of hard cases to come strolling out of the garage and tell me to bounce before I got hurt. I walked up closer to the place, considered going inside, but what that would accomplish I didn’t know, apart from scaring the dispatcher and whoever else was in there. The old guy with the broom looked like he was about finished, so I decided to give him a shot. “Hello, Gramps,” I said. “You speak English?”
“Hello yourself,” the guy said, straightening up a little. “Yeah, my English is okay, seeing how I was born in King’s County Hospital.”
“Sorry. Seemed like a valid question.”
“Nuttin’ to it,” the guy said. His accent was homegrown New York. “You lookin’ for a job? You gotta go inside and fill out a application.”
“No, I don’t want a job. Besides, driving a bus in New York City traffic sounds like my idea of hell.”
The old man nodded. “Kinda like bein’ the fattest guy on the dance floor.”
“What I’m looking for is some information about the bus company.”
The old man shrugged. “What’s to know? Sign up forty, fifty a ya closest friends, youse can all ride down to Atlantic City together. Okay? Now you know everything.”
“I heard this place was owned and run by one of the tongs.”
The old man shook his head. “Tongs? Are you for fuckin’ real? All my life I lived in this city and I still can’t get past the Chans.”
“What Chans?”
“Charlie and Jackie. Buddy, this is only a bus company. You already talked to about half the drivers, I seen ya. Inside there you got three mechanics and a oiler, all of ’em too fat and outa shape to hit you with a karate chop. Pork chop, be more likely. You got two office ladies, one of ’em is pretty mean, I’ll give ya that, but I still don’t think you got nothin’ to worry about. I think you could take her. And you got the dispatcher, worst he could do is maybe run over ya foot with his wheelchair, and you got the manager, who’s dumber than a box a rocks. And you got me. That’s the whole story.”
“Now I am disappointed.”
“Why?” the old guy said. “You was expectin’ a fight? You lookin’ to take a beatin’? That’s ya thing, it’s okay by me, but ya wastin’ ya time around here. I hoid they got a place over in the Village, fa fifty bucks a naked girl will tie ya up and slap the shit outa ya. Sounds like a gas ta me but I don’t think my ticker would hold up.”
“Some other time, maybe. You ever hear of a girl named Melanie Wing?”
“Melanie Wing?” He scratched his head. “Melanie Wing. I don’t think so. Knew Dickie Wing, him and his brother Raymond used ta bootleg cigarettes up from Virginia someplace, but I think they’re both inside.”
“You sound like you got a million stories.”
“Million and a half,” he said.
“I should come over here and buy you lunch sometime. You can tell me all about the old days.”
He shrugged. “I ain’t hard ta find,” he said. “Just look for this broom, you’ll prolly find me on one end of it.”
It felt like a wasted day.
I went down to Avenue C and looked at the Los Paraíso but I couldn’t think of a reason to go inside. I stopped in the bodega across the street, got a cup of that Puerto Rican coffee. Once is an experiment, twice is an affectation, but three times implies a commitment. One more and I would have to find out how to make the stuff myself, carry the pot and the makings with me. Maybe, though, it would turn out to be one of those things tied to a certain place and time. Maybe, once I got away from Avenue C, it would lose its power and I wouldn’t want it anymore.
“Vale,” a voice said, pronouncing the word oddly, almost as though I had done a poor job laying out someone’s suits. “We t’ought you gone, man.”
It was the Worm, and the guy had cat feet, I had not heard him coming. To find him behind me, unexpected and very close, was perturbing, but I tried to sound normal when I answered him. “Still around,” I said. “Why do you care about what I do?”
He came around my left side, stood there staring out across the avenue in the direction of the hotel. “What gods did we piss off,” he said, “to draw a
snake like you into our little garden?”
“From what I hear, you’re something of a god yourself.”
He laughed softly. “Believers think,” he said, “that when it rain, got to be someone to make it rain. Funny, no? Between god and da weatherman, listen to da weatherman.”
“So it’s wrong, then. They tell me you are shadowed by Ogun.”
“Believe what you want, I don’t care,” he said. “But you should know that Chang and Eng want you dead.”
“Chang and Eng? You mean, your partners. That what you call them? So how come you haven’t killed me yet?”
He stood silent for a moment, staring at the cars passing by. “Hector maybe miss you,” he said, finally.
“Hector. The five-year-old that stands in the hall outside his mother’s door.”
He shook his head. “Listen to me, vale. I take dere money.” I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my head. “You ever done that? Sell your soul to another man?”
Dick Plover’s fat and rosy face popped into my mind. “Yeah.”
“Den you know,” the Worm said. “Dere are times, you wanna live, you do your job. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“You’re telling me you and me ain’t going to the ball game together any time soon?”
“I mean, if you got any sense, do what you got to do, and get lost.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“I had a sister once myself,” he said. A moment passed, and his words hung between us. The cabs on Avenue C steamed past, dueling in a ritual form of automotive combat. So he knew about Melanie. I wondered how. “It wasn’t me. And the two Chinamen would not lower themselves.”
“Is that so.”
“We never touch her,” he said. “I knew her, I admit it. But she was pure, vale, not like us, not like you and me. She could look at a man and make him sorry for not washing his hands and brushing his teeth like he should. She walk down da street over dere and all of us, man and boy, we look down when she pass, promise ourselves to be better from now on. Took a special kind of evil to touch that.”
I had stopped breathing.
“Yeah?” I finally said. “You know anybody that evil?”
“Who could tell? A man like that, he hide his blackness behind a white veil. Was a priest in Cap Haitien, where I was born. Best priest in Haiti. Fed the poor. Cure the sick. Walk on water, maybe. But if you was a small child, you don’t wan to be the girl who bring him his shirt, pick up the dirty ones.” He grabbed a handful of his crotch. “He was so big, down there, that sometimes the girls died. No one ever find out what he done with the bodies.”
“What happened to him?”
The Worm sighed. “One night, my father and my uncles, they come to his house and they bring him out. They pull two car tire down over his head.” He stood stiffly, his arms clasped at his sides, unconsciously pantomiming his memories. “You know. Gasoline inside the tires. He scream, vale, after they light him up, but not like a man. And in the hills outside of town, the loups-garous hiding there hear him screaming while he burned, and they howl back, all that night. He was one of theirs.”
“Loups-garous?”
“Werewolves.”
“You believe in that?”
He shrugged. “There was a special kind of evil in the hills around Cap Haitien. Simple people had to give it a name.” He glanced over at me. “But they make him pay, for what he did to my sister. And the rest of them.”
I remembered something I’d been wondering about. “What does ‘vale’ mean?”
He blinked, surprised, perhaps, that I hadn’t bothered to look it up. “Thief,” he said. “They say this is what you are. No?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m really just a contractor.”
He chuckled softly. “Too bad,” he said. “Don’t forget what I tell you.” He walked away, then, crossed Avenue C without waiting for the light, and the cabs parted like water in a stream to let him pass.
I was tempted to believe him. Sure, he was in a bad business, and there was little doubt in my mind that he colored outside the lines, but still, I got the impression that he had his code, that there were lines he wouldn’t cross. A lot of guys in his line of work will do anything, say anything to get what they want, but most politicians are like that and no one is surprised by it. What bothered me most about the conversation was not the implied threat to my person, but his impression of Melanie. She was an unfallen angel, according to the Worm, although I had to admit that his judgment might be skewed, somewhat, by his line of work. Maybe to a guy like him, a girl who didn’t sleep with farm animals qualified as pure, or relatively so. But all my instincts had been pointing me at the Hotel Los Paraíso, and I had to wonder if all my instincts, and all my theories, too, had been wrong.
And then I thought of what he’d called me. “Vale,” thief. Called me that the first time he saw me. I wondered who told him that.
Chapter Twelve
There was a flea market in Greenwich Village, and idle curiosity drew me in. There were people selling bongs, terrariums, tie-dyed shirts, old manual typewriters, cheesy jewelry, collectibles . . . I suppose you could consider anything collectible, the question is, why? Anyway, I bought a camera, an SLR from the predigital age. The thing came with a long lens and an auto-winder. It was in great shape apart from some scratches on the lens, and totally useless. The camera reefed and snapped but I didn’t know where you’d ever find film for it, or where you’d send the film to be developed into pictures. The vendor told me all about how rare and valuable it would be someday and why it was therefore worth the perfectly reasonable price he was asking. I told him how its only foreseeable useful employment would be as an oddly shaped doorstop to hold my screen door open so my cat could get out when he wanted to go take a shit. He offered to throw in the batteries and a shoulder strap, and I wound up giving him twenty-five bucks for it.
Such a deal.
That’s how I came to have an antique camera slung around my neck as I sat in a gypsy cab on Avenue C. I’d found a driver who was okay with an hourly rate, I think the guy was Bengali but it was hard to say for sure because he had a speech impediment to go along with his accent and incomplete grasp of the American language. He was a talkative guy, though, and my lack of comprehension did not seem to discourage him at all. He got all excited when the first girl came out of the Hotel Los Paraíso and got into a waiting limo. She was tall, thin, carried herself with a regal air. She was accompanied by one of the men who worked with the Worm and since I still suffered traces of the emotional hangover from the last time, we stayed put. Guy on a motorcycle pulled out and followed the limo. Nice bike, I think it was a Triumph T-Bird, but the guy looked too big for it. I wondered who the hell he was. Looked like he was from Kansas. I wondered what tornado had dropped a shitkicker like him in Manhattan’s Alphabet City.
The next girl came out alone, and there was no limo waiting, just a yellow cab that stopped at her hail, so we followed her.
No cowboy, and no motorcycle.
I thought of them as girls, even though they were probably not all that much younger than I was. Ten or twelve years, maybe. The terms “hooker,” “prostitute,” and “sex worker” might have applied, but they felt a bit harsh to me, even unspoken. “Young adult who has made some seriously poor choices,” although accurate, was too unwieldy. I had certainly made more than my own share of stupid choices, and since my continued survival sometimes felt attributable more to dumb-ass luck than to good judgment, who was I to look down my nose?
“Girl” would have to do.
All the girls from Los Paraíso were tall, it seemed.
The one we were following had brown hair framing her somewhat angular face, and although not conventionally beautiful, she was striking enough in her own way. Her cab delivered her to a giant hotel in midtown, and I followed her inside. I was just in time to see her shake hands with some guy in the hotel lobby. Neither of them seemed awkward or nervous in any way, they c
ould have both been Bible salesmen for all anyone could tell. The guy was obviously prosperous, you could tell from the Cartier tank watch and the wardrobe, but he was overweight, thin on top, and sported an old-fashioned skinny mustache, the kind most men would only grow if they lost a bet. He seemed totally at ease, right up until the moment he noticed me pointing my empty camera at him, reefing and snapping, reefing and snapping. Funny how fast some fat guys can move when they want to, he ran like a man afflicted with a sudden and violent urge to void his bowels.
The girl turned and glared at me. “You asshole!”
Some guy wearing a hotel jacket was at my elbow a second or two later and he came on very strong. “I’m gonna have to confiscate that,” he said. “No pictures on hotel property.” He tried to move me but I wasn’t moving. I handed him my camera.
“You really want this? Be a collectible someday. For twenty-five bucks it’s all yours.”
He stopped trying to push me and he took the camera, saw what it was, and scowled. “What the hell?”
I handed him a fifty. Hey, it was Manhattan. “No trouble here.”
He backed away a step, glanced over at the girl, then handed the camera back to me, looked like a guy holding a dead rat by the tail. I took it and he sidled away, muttering. I walked over to the girl. “Did I cost you some money here? Because I’m good for it.”
She waited just a heartbeat too long. “Sixteen hundred bucks.”
“Sixteen? Really? I’m gonna guess the tab was eight hundred, and that you’d see four, max. Am I close?”
“What do you want,” she said, eyeing the exit.
“I’ll go five hundred, cash, for a half hour’s private conversation.”
“Yeah?” She hefted her bag, probably wondering if she could take me out with whatever she had in there.