by David Gordon
Then, distracted by the mayhem and lulled into complacency, Gio’s boys let their guard down, underestimating their adversaries—always a mistake. An angry granny hauled off and smacked a guy in the head with a stool. Another guy got kicked in the balls. Then the Africans, hearing the uproar, came up to see what was happening and jumped in on the Chinese side. A full-on brawl began, fists and bats flying. Then sirens were heard and everyone fled, declaring an instant truce while running side by side from the law. The police caught no one, except some shoppers who were trapped and released, but the secret store was shut down, the merchandise was seized, and the whole party played on the local news.
A big success for Gio, Nero assured him, and all the guys laughed their asses off while he told the story in the back of the ice-cream truck warehouse where Gio held a quick meeting before heading over to Caprisi’s, the family restaurant, for Sunday dinner. But all he felt was stress, frustration over the past, and dread of the future—the very things his wife told him to avoid and let go of. To breathe through, as in yoga. To release, so that he could stay centered, here, now, in the present.
But it didn’t work. At dinner he had no appetite, which did not go down well with his mother, and he lost his temper with the kids, which pissed off Carol. Afterward, when he told her he was going to swing by the gym for a boxing workout, she urged him to go for once. It was that bad. He texted Paul, who was at the movies, but who answered that they could meet in an hour. Gio hated people who answered texts at the movies, and sometimes he had to restrain himself from snatching their phones from their hands and crushing them underfoot … but in this case he was relieved.
The gym was a good cover. For one thing, one of his properties did actually lease space to a boxing gym, and it made sense as a place he might go after work or on the weekend. And it explained why he came home bruised.
33
Joe and Yelena had brunch on the boardwalk, and since their Irish credit card was paying, she ordered them caviar blinis, a sturgeon platter, and smoked salmon with eggs. The food was delicious, and for a while neither spoke as they both wolfed it hungrily down. She ate nearly as fast as he did, and just as much. Families filled the tables around them, and a constant stream of people trooped by: parents holding kids by the hand as they headed toward Coney Island for rides and hot dogs; teenagers smoking and trying to jump the benches on skateboards; old Russian men heading to the water, carrying their hard round bellies before them, or heading back, water dribbling behind them as they sat to dry in the sun; young women in shorts and sandals or jeans and heels, stepping carefully over the planks. Clutches of old women chattered on the benches. A group of younger men leaned and smoked along the railing, some muttering into phones, others with their eyes closed against the sun. They took their shirts off, and Joe noticed their tattoos.
“I like your tattoos,” he told Yelena. “You got them in Russia?”
“You noticed? I didn’t think you even looked at me last night.” She signaled a waiter for two coffees and then lit a smoke.
Joe smiled. “Oh, I noticed plenty. But I’m not used to drinking. Or jumping off roofs. What can I say? You wore me out.”
Now she smiled, too. “A lot of men say that.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. But the tattoos did. You covered them with makeup for the club?”
She nodded, thanking the waiter in Russian as the coffee came. “I wanted to blend in, you know? To be less identifiable. And maybe someone there can read Russian tattoos.”
“Even with makeup and a wig, I doubt you ever blend in.”
She laughed, smoke billowing up. “Sorry. It is too late for flirting now, my friend. You had your chance.”
Joe laughed with her. He drank his coffee, and as the waiter passed, he handed him his card. “Well then,” he told her, “as your fake husband, let me make it up to you and take you shopping.”
They rode the train into the city and hit the stores. Joe bought a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, underwear, and socks—not from a package this time—and a black suit, along with a couple of white button-downs and two ties, one black, one blue. Yelena bought a dress, jeans, T-shirts, underclothes, and designer running gear and sneakers. They bought toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, and other toiletries, and Yelena got a hairbrush. Then they got suitcases to carry it all and checked into a downtown hotel, someplace midrange and midsized, using the same credit card and posing as an Irish couple on their honeymoon. Joe managed a passable accent based on his paternal great-uncle, good enough to fool the friendly, not terribly bright young woman who worked the Sunday shift. Yelena just smiled.
They unpacked, changed, and threw their old clothes into the trash on the way out. Joe had on clean jeans and a fresh T-shirt. Yelena wore a blue cotton dress that showed off her shoulders. They went into separate banks and took cash advances on the Irish cards. Then they went on the hunt for Clarence. He seemed the logical starting point. Don was just a name: some British prick named Don. Juno was a kid. Clarence was a local and a longtime pro, and he had been the contractor who hired the whole string for the heist, which implied he knew people and was known.
They spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the night working their way, first through midtown, then up to Harlem and down to Tribeca, avoiding Chinatown, where Uncle Chen might have eyes out for Joe. They visited bars, pool halls, backroom dice games, a couple of storefront weed peddlers, fences who specialized in art or other rare items, pizza joints, kosher delis, a fried chicken place, a Cuban-Chinese place, a regular Cuban place, and a twenty-four-hour doughnut shop. They bought rounds of drinks, lost on purpose at pool, ordered plates of food that they barely touched, and fed folded bills to waiters and bartenders and a whole bent ecosystem.
Clarence was known as a longtime heister, specializing mostly in hijacking and commercial burglaries. A bartender at a construction workers’ bar that sold swag out of the back said Clarence had a cover as a real contractor, hanging drywall in Jersey, but the only evidence of it he’d seen was a truck with Jersey plates. He even found an old number, in a Rolodex, for Christ’s sake, but when Joe pointed out that the number was in the 212 area code—Manhattan, not Jersey—he just shrugged. The door guy at a downtown massage parlor catering to finance guys told Joe, who told him he was checking Clarence out before taking a job, that his cousin had done time with him upstate, where Clarence was locked up for armed robbery, and that he was a stand-up guy who could be trusted. The cousin, unfortunately, was back in prison and couldn’t comment. A waitress at a steak house told them that her ex-boyfriend knew Clarence and had brought him there to eat sometimes. He tipped okay and was nice, though the ex-boyfriend—a pickpocket, pool hustler, and degenerate gambler and alcoholic who liked to hit girls when drunk—was not. For fifty bucks, she told them where he hung out, at a dive bar near Union Square, hustling NYU boys. For a hundred, and a subtle threat of demasculation from Yelena, who would have been glad to even things up for his ex, the bad boyfriend coughed up the location of an apartment in the East Thirties where Clarence hosted all-night poker games. They walked by. It was a standard four-story walkup, but there was no way to tell which apartment was his—the ex-boyfriend couldn’t recall an apartment or floor number, and no one had known a last name. So they cabbed it back to the hotel.
“I think maybe we should just hang out here tonight,” Joe said when they got into the room. “Order room service or whatever. We put in a lot of face time today.”
Yelena looked puzzled. “You need to FaceTime?” She held out her phone.
“Thanks. But I just mean we should keep a low profile and then find Clarence tomorrow.”
She shrugged and kicked off her shoes. “Okay, so what do we do? I mean, before you fall asleep and start snoring like a dragon.”
He pulled off his own shoes and grabbed his book before hopping onto the bed, back against the headboard. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to read.”
She snorted and put her phone awa
y. She picked up the remote and sat on the edge of the bed, zooming through the channel choices, looking back at him every few minutes. Then, with a yelp of surprise, she spoke to him in Russian.
“What?” he said.
“You are reading a Russian book. Idiot.”
“Yes. Dostoyevsky.”
“You are liking?”
“I am. I love all his books.” He laid it facedown on the night table. “Actually, you have a little Filippovna in you, I think. I could see a man ruining himself for you as you throw his hundred thousand rubles in the fire.”
“Ha! You must be a little bit Prince Myshkin then, an idiot. I’d never throw money in a fire. Not even rubles. They are good for toilet paper at least. My favorite is Demons. You know this one?”
“Yes. Why is it your favorite?”
“When I read this book I thought, At last someone understands.” She laughed.
He leaned forward and peered at her closely. “That’s a bit chilling. Because you felt like Stavrogin? I’m not sure I feel safe snoring here while you’re beyond good and evil in a godless world.”
She grinned and punched his arm. “No. I am not nihilist like him. Life is not meaningless. And I don’t hurt the innocent. I have my beliefs. But they are not in God or man.”
“I’m surprised,” Joe said.
“Why?”
He touched her between her shoulder blades, lightly, in the place where the Madonna’s halo rose between the straps of her dress. “This,” he said.
“Oh. Ha. That is not what it means. You read Russian books but not Russian tattoos.”
“Teach me.”
She smiled and, turning her back to him, lowered the dress, letting it fall around her waist. “For us, religious images, like church or Mary, are good luck symbols for thieves. And the Madonna with baby means I am a child of thievery. Born into crime.”
“And this,” Joe asked, touching the shaded dollar sign on her left hip.
“Means I am a safecracker, as you know.”
“And this?” He touched the skull, which grinned, empty eyed, from where her right hip jutted above the dress’s blue folds.
“Everyone knows what a skull means,” she said, still facing away from him.
“Death,” he said.
“Yes, but not mine.”
“It means you have killed.”
She turned and faced him now, letting the dress fall away, looking him in the eye, her mouth close to his. “Any more questions?”
He laid his hands over her shoulders, where the two stars were inked. “Just these.”
“Stars?” She shrugged. “Same as they mean here. They are like my badge.” She smiled. “They show my high rank.”
“You are royalty then,” he said, kissing her mouth very softly.
“Yes,” she said, holding his bottom lip between her teeth for a moment, then releasing it. “I am a princess of thieves.”
34
“I ordered from the Lebanese place on Eighth Avenue.”
Adrian looked up from the newspaper as Heather walked into the living room and sat on the couch beside him.
“I got enough for him, too.” She waved dismissively at the guest bedroom, where Clarence had retreated to watch sports and stay out of the way.
“You mean the Israeli place?” Adrian asked.
“I think they’re Lebanese,” Heather said. “They have that salad I like with the beans.”
“Did you go in? Hear them talking? I bet they’re Jews.”
“I ordered online. But actually, I think they’re Egyptian. I just remembered there’s a camel on the window.”
“Please. Like every place with a cactus is really Mexican.”
“Fine. I’ll cancel. I just wanted lamb kebabs. Jesus.”
“I don’t care. Hummus is hummus. I’m sick of it.” Adrian threw the paper down as if it were filled with articles on hummus. “What is it with white people? Hummus. Salsa. A whole culture and cuisine and you fixate on this one basic item and beat it to death. And then deport the people who make it. It’s fetishistic. Like white America consuming countless tons of hummus and salsa, compulsively scooping it up with chips during every football game, every Fourth of July, obsessed with the symbol while totally denying and dehumanizing what it’s a symbol of.”
“You should write a term paper on it,” Heather said, slumping back.
“Very funny. I’m just saying. It bugs me in a way you don’t understand.”
“Being fetishized as a symbol and yet dismissed as a person? No, as a blond girl I wouldn’t.”
“Okay. Good point …”
“And who are you kidding? You’re from Michigan. You hate hummus, and salsa gives you heartburn.”
“Okay, point taken, I said.” He took her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m tense.”
She pouted, pulling away.
“Honey? Are you tense, too?” He reached up under her arm and tickled.
“Stop …”
He grabbed her again, under the pits, and she giggled. “Please?” he said, laughing now, too. “We’ll eat the Jew lamb.”
She laughed and turned to him. “Shut up. You’re so silly.” Then she hugged him and squeezed the knot at the root of his neck. He flinched. “But you really are too tense. It’s work. It’s getting to you. Everything is going to work out, I promise.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I believe in you.”
She looked into his eyes and he believed her, at least. Believed that she believed. Which was close enough. The door buzzed. She jumped up.
“That’s the hummus! Go set the table.”
She went to the door. He got out plates, forks, and knives. Serving spoons for the damn hummus. She came back with the bag in her hand and he had to admit it smelled good. He was starving. That was half of his anger right there, he knew.
“Fuck,” she said.
“What?”
“I can’t fucking believe this.”
“What?”
“They forgot the lamb.”
“Are you joking? Where is the delivery guy?”
“He’s gone.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“He’s gone. It’s just some kid.”
“I’ll catch him!” Adrian called over his shoulder as he ran out the door. He caught the kid at the elevator. He was a slouchy white kid with long black hair under a ball cap and a Gorgoroth T-shirt.
“Hey, you the guy who just delivered my food?”
“Yeah?”
“You brought us the wrong order. Our food is missing. There’s supposed to be lamb.”
“Sorry, dude, I just deliver it. I don’t know what’s in there.”
“Well, you should take it back and bring the food we paid for.”
The elevator came. The kid got on. “Can’t, man. They just pay me to bring it. You got to complain to them.”
Adrian got on with him. “You know what, you’re right. I will.”
The kid shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not even supposed to be working tonight. I missed band practice for this.”
They rode in silence. “What kind of band?” Adrian asked.
“Metal. Kind of a cross between death metal and speed metal.”
“Nice.”
Silence returned. The doors opened. The kid looked at Adrian, a bit hesitantly. “I’ve got to get my bike.”
“Right. I’ll see you there.”
The kid rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he muttered, as Adrian held the door for him. The kid went to a nearby pole with a parking sign and unhooked his bike. He slid his headphones over his hat and hopped on, glancing back once more as he rose on the pedals, then pushed down and rolled into the traffic.
Adrian walked the three crosstown blocks quickly, breathing in the night air, trying to relax on the exhale the way the yoga podcasts Heather played said to. He smelled pizza as he reached Eighth Avenue and his stomach growled. Then he saw the place: Star of Sahara. With a camel and a pyramid on the win
dow. So maybe it was Egyptian after all. He peeked into the alley next door and saw the kid’s bike, locked to a pipe with a couple of others. The kitchen door was propped open and he could hear pots and pans clanging inside. Now he smelled roasted lamb. He leaned against the wall and waited a couple of minutes, thinking how maybe listening to some metal for a change might relax him more than yoga. Then the kid came back out, headphones on, a new batch of orders dangling from his arms in plastic bags. Adrian stepped into the light, his right hand held close to his side.
“Hey,” the kid said, confused and too loud, deafened by the music in his head. “You’ve got to go in front, dude.” Then, as he turned and knelt on one knee by his bike, Adrian struck. He came from behind, left hand yanking the kid’s hair back—the hat and earphones slipping away, frantic machine music pouring out into the alley—as his right hand drew the razor-sharp blade across his throat. The blood gushed all over the bagged orders on the ground, splattering the white plastic, and Adrian pushed him forward, to avoid the spray. He wiped the blade quickly on the kid’s jeans and went, folding it away.
Fresh lamb, he thought as he crossed the street, pulling out his phone. “Hey, honey? I’ve got an idea. How about pizza?”
Adrian Kaan had been born in America, but his parents were Israeli and Palestinian. A journalist and a human rights lawyer, they were peace activists, and even after they emigrated, settling in Michigan of all places, where his mother got a teaching job, they continued to visit the Middle East frequently. It was on one of these trips that their car was destroyed, caught in a cross fire between militants and Israeli fighters. Both his parents died in the front seat. Four-year-old Adrian, strapped into his car seat in back, survived.