Connie was sitting on a sofa in a black quilted robe, with a towel around her hair. She was applying red lacquer to her nails and watching a game show on a large color television set. She saw him and was a bit too slow in suppressing the smile that sprang onto her face. The kid did not like people smiling at him. Jodón had instructed her carefully on how she was to handle El Chivato and promised her an extremely large tip if all went well. He had also filled her in on his reputation in Mexico and Arizona. Don’t offer unless he asks, he said. Get him anything he wants. Don’t give him any advice. Never, never laugh at him.
Connie was the daughter of a Dominican woman, an illegal, born right here in the city. She worked out of a lounge on Broadway, girl-friending for a succession of Dominican and Central American bad boys, all with fairly short life expectancies. Not Colombians, though. The Colombians were known for going after the girls too, even before they hit the guys, as a form of warning. She had, naturally enough, encountered chuteros before this, but El Chivato was in a class by himself. When he fucked her (and of course he had fucked her, a number of times, immediately upon their return from visiting Rikers Island), it was like being in one of those movies with an animal. Connie had seen a number of such films (they seemed popular with the men in her circle) and she had always wondered what went on in the minds of the women in them when the burro or the dog was thrusting away. Now she thought she had some hint. There was nothing in his eyes when he did it, not that she saw much of his eyes. He liked it with her face pressed down in a pillow. What he looked at was the picture of the elderly woman in a silver frame that he kept on his dresser. That was another thing. Don’t look at the picture. Don’t say anything about the picture.
He was staring at her now. One problem was that he was so good-looking that it was a moment before you realized that what confronted your eye was not a small, sweet-faced kid, but something entirely outside your experience.
“What amuses you?” he asked. He had a soft, almost whispery voice.
“Ah, just something on the TV. You going out, huh?”
He kept staring at her for what seemed like a long time. She was finding it hard to breathe, and she could feel her pulse building in her ears. Finally he said, “Tell me how to find this place.”
“It’s in Brooklyn,” she said. “You have to take the subway, or drive.” In that outfit you better drive, she thought.
“I will drive,” he said. He had been on the subway in Mexico. It was not to his taste. “Get me a car. Not stolen.” He sat down in an armchair and directed his attention to the TV. She rose immediately, dressed in haste, with two fingernails left unpainted, and went out. At the lounge, which was on Broadway at 189th Street and called the Club Carib, she made an arrangement with Ramon the bartender. For two thousand dollars she arranged the rental, for two weeks, of Ramon’s brother Felipe’s 1975 Pontiac Firebird. Felipe had a large number-of cars, many of doubtful provenance, but all lovingly repainted and maintained. While she waited, she drank two vodkas. She would have preferred rum, but she knew that El Chivato did not like the smell of liquor. As she drank, several of the local guapos passed the time of day with her, and one inquired whether she was back in circulation. She wished that she was. The Obregons were, she judged, even more stupid than the normal run of men and, besides that, had absolutely no idea how America worked. And they did not want to learn either, which made them different from the immigrants, legal and illegal, among whom she had been raised. And as bad as they were, they were nearly gringos compared to that little pendejo up in the apartment. Still, there was a good deal of money left, and she would stick it out while it remained. It never occurred to her to steal the money. Don’t steal money, don’t steal drugs: rules to live by up in the Heights and Inwood. She did not think that the pendejo would last long. Someone would push him, or say something, and there would be a killing and that would be that. The cops would not have much trouble finding somebody dressed like El Chivato in New York.
She finished her drink, and one of Felipe’s boys came around with the car. It was black with a red vinyl interior. Connie drove back to the apartment and gave El Chivato the keys. “Do you know how to get there?” she asked helpfully.
He ignored the question and gave her the famous look. “Write again to the fiscal,” he ordered. “Say again the Obregons are innocent and say we are watching him and that we can reach him at any time.”
El Chivato then walked out, to locate a man he had never seen in a city where he had never been. He had absolutely no doubt that he would succeed in doing so, and that he would not be bothered by the police or anyone else. This was because his mother was a saint, and God naturally paid more attention to her prayers than to the prayers of ordinary mothers. This had always been true and was the reason for his great success, why he could walk through guarded doorways and squads of bodyguards to do his work, and also why he had never been arrested or even questioned. This is what gave him his nerveless courage and confidence. (Of the subtle networks of bribery and subornation that attended his assassinations El Chivato was completely unaware.)
He drove south on the West Side Highway. He was a careful driver, keeping under the posted speed limits and driving in the right-hand lane. He was not in a hurry. Besides driving, his attainments included a fair fluency in English, from his years in Nogales, Arizona, and much watching of cross-border TV, and the ability to read in both Spanish and English. He had an infallible memory for faces and automobiles. He could also read a map and had a remarkable sense of direction.
It was somewhat after the noon hour and traffic was light. It took him a little over an hour to drive from Washington Heights to the bar on Court Street, Rudy’s. This was a small, dim place under the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known by Connie and the brothers to be a hangout of the man he sought.
Inside, half a dozen men and the bartender were watching a Giants game playing on a color TV suspended over the bar. There was a brief silence when the kid walked in, a comment, a laugh, and conversation and TV watching resumed. El Chivato stood at the bar, and the bartender came over and stood there, waiting. He was a middle-aged Puerto Rican with a pocked face and thinning combed-back hair.
“I’m looking for Lucky,” El Chivato said.
“Who?”
“Lucky. A big man, with a big nose.”
“Oh, him. He ain’t been around. What can I get for you?”
“Nothing. Where is he?”
The bartender sighed and rolled his eyes. “Hey, cowboy, this is a bar, not the fuckin’ phone book. I said he ain’t been around. So order a drink or take a hike.”
El Chivato pulled the .357 out from under his coat and shot the TV. In Hermosillo he would have shot a dog, in the unlikely event that anyone in Hermosillo had spoken to him like that. A .357 makes an extremely loud sound when fired, and El Chivato now had the undivided attention of everyone in the place, especially that of the bartender, who was staring into the smoking muzzle of the pistol.
“Where is he?” El Chivato asked again. The bartender was shaking. Sweat pooled in the pits on his face.
“Honest to God I don’t know! Jesus, man, take it easy!” cried the man.
“You do know. He comes in here all the time, I hear,” said El Chivato. The pistol went off again, shattering several bottles and a beer-company mirror behind the bar. The flame of the blast scorched the side of the bartender’s face. He fell to his knees behind the bar, clinging to the edge of the bar with his fingers as if hanging from a cliff; he wet his pants.
He looked up and saw the gun pointed down at him. He said, “Only on the weekends, Jesus, please, he only comes in on the weekends here, man. Please, he’s a dealer, he hangs out at the Palm, other places, Jesus, man … that’s all I know, I swear on my mother, man …”
El Chivato questioned the bartender as to the location of the Palm and the other places where Lucky might be found. Then he turned his back on them like a matador who has stymied a bull and walked out.
He paused f
or a moment outside the bar and looked both ways, as a cautious old man does before crossing a busy street. There were no pedestrians approaching and little traffic. He turned on his heel, went back into the bar. The six customers and the bartender had not moved. They stared at him, like mice paralyzed under a snake’s jeweled gaze. El Chivato threw open his coat, unlimbered his shotgun with a smooth, practiced motion, and killed everyone in the place.
Fatyma’s plan was a simple one: a young, rich, handsome man would fall madly in love with her and take her to Hollywood, where she would become a famous movie star, admired and loved by millions. Given her limited experience in the world and the narrowness of her literary sources, this seemed a reasonable goal. Every one of the heroines of the romances she had been able to obtain achieved the former goal, and the biography of Marilyn Monroe indicated that no particular ability was necessary to achieve the latter. It might be better to go to Hollywood and become a star first, Fatyma thought, for it was clear that Marilyn had plenty of rich, handsome men to choose from, but she was not entirely clear about how distant Hollywood was or how she might get there. She had on hand $28.35, in coin and small bills, pilfered over months from the family till. This might be sufficient to make the journey. She would discover this at the airport.
She rode the subway to the last stop, in the Bronx, and then back again to Manhattan. She saw a sign that said TIMES SQUARE and on impulse sprang up and left the train, clutching her small suitcase. She had heard of Times Square, but vaguely, as being the center of something exciting. Like Hollywood, the location had a symbolic ring to it, connoting romance, America, the mysterious pursuits of American adults, the life in which she desired to immerse herself.
The reality at four in the morning was mildly disappointing. The lights were alluring, the people less so. They seemed not too different from those in Brooklyn, especially the people in the sections starting a few blocks from her home, where she was not allowed to go. A large proportion of them seemed to be black or Spanish, which surprised her. She had imagined that once out of Brooklyn she would be in America, the land of the movies and TV, where the vast majority of faces would be white.
She walked around the periphery of the square for some while, from Forty-first to Forty-fourth, up Seventh and down Broadway, looking in the shop windows. This was disappointing too; she was not interested in cameras, electronics, or souvenirs, and she was shocked at some of the magazines on display, and at the marquees of the movie houses and at the places where men went to watch women undress. In fact, Fatyma had no information whatever about sex. In an Arab village she would have been ensconced in a community of women whose gossip and shared wisdom about the stupidity and perfidy of men would have provided her by her current (marriageable) age with knowledge sufficient to produce another generation. As it was, she had only her mother, who had withdrawn into the morose silence of the deracinated immigrant, and Fatyma had been from too early an age denied the companionship of American peers. What she knew came from her reading and from snatches of movies seen in other people’s homes, and the songs and chatter of her radio.
It passed briefly through her mind that her father’s view of the world was correct, that outside the family and the narrow world of the Arab, there was nothing but what her father called fornication. And sin. Fatyma was not entirely sure what fornication was. She wished that she had been able to watch more television, since everything on television related in some way to fornication, according to her father, but this had not been possible. The Daouds had a TV, but the channel dial had been snapped off and it was exclusively devoted to service as a VCR monitor, playing tapes of Egyptian movies and sermons from Palestine and Syria. It had something to do with kissing, she had concluded, which you never saw them doing in the Egyptian movies. At any rate, she had gathered that a man and a woman were necessary, and that they couldn’t be married, since clearly married people (in her experience) did not even kiss. It was also related in some way to love and passion. In Fountain of Desire Brent and Melanie were always kissing with burning lips, their hearts pounding as one. Also their loins were afire, and Melanie’s breasts throbbed. Fatyma knew what breasts were, and as for loins, she could make a fair guess, although the book was short on the details of what occurred when you dissolved in a fiery embrace on the silken sheets. How this related to sleeping with men she could not decide. Marilyn, she knew, “slept with” a good number of men so that they would help her become a movie star and after she did become one, because she loved them. Fatyma thought that she could easily do this too: you went to bed and you awakened—what could be simpler?
The sky was now lightening above the eastward-facing urban canyons, and Fatyma found she was both tired and hungry. She had not slept at all the previous night, of course, and had dozed only fitfully during the subway ride. And she had hardly eaten anything since her father had told her about her forthcoming marriage to the old man. She went into an all-night place on Forty-third. It was harshly bright and steamy with the smell of bitter coffee, toast, and warm grease. She sat at the counter and ordered a double-hamburger basket, coffee, and a slice of apple pie. It was the first time she had ordered a meal for herself in a restaurant. It struck her suddenly that she would be eating like this forever after, in restaurants, although she expected that soon she would be eating in better places and that a man would be paying.
The meal came and it was huge, the pile of fries threatening to cascade from the oval plate. She ate greedily until she was full. The woman behind the counter filled the coffee cup without being asked, which for some reason made Fatyma feel particularly adult. Fatyma looked around the restaurant. Ten booths covered with beige leatherette, red plastic tabletops, a line of separate tables and chairs down the center aisle, a counter. A ragged man wearing many layers of clothing was sleeping in one of the booths. Another held four women wearing short pants and short fake-fur or suede jackets in unlikely colors. They were laughing and pointing out the window at some other women of the same type standing on the street. Another booth held a group of grimy-looking young people wearing black clothes. One of them had lime green hair, and another had his hair drawn into long spikes. Fatyma looked at these people carefully. The women she knew were whores, since they were wearing heavy makeup. What the other people were she could not tell. Perhaps they were insane or members of some sort of religion she had not heard of.
“Hey, are you going to finish those fries?”
The speaker was a young woman sitting next to Fatyma at the counter. She was thin, pale, and foxy-faced, and had thin, dirty white hair escaping from under a red acrylic cap emblazoned with the symbol of some professional team. She was dressed in a soiled denim jacket over a sweatshirt and blue jeans. Fatyma shook her head and pushed the plate a few inches toward the stranger, who brought it in front of her place, flooded the fries with catsup, and consumed them in thirty seconds.
Fatyma observed the woman closely. A whore, without a doubt, lipstick in a pale purplish shade, lavender eyeshadow, and powder above a neck that was not clean. When the woman had cleaned up the plate with the last fry, Fatyma pushed over her half-finished pie.
“Hey, thanks,” said the woman. Then with her mouth half-full, she indicated Fatyma’s suitcase. “You traveling somewhere?”
“Yes,” said Fatyma. “I am going to Hollywood, California.”
“Hollywood, huh?” She grinned and asked lightly, “What, you’re gonna be a movie star?”
“Yes,” Fatyma said matter-of-factly, and smiled.
The young woman looked at Fatyma to see if she had spoken sarcastically, but decided she had not. She asked, “When’re you going?”
“I think today. Do you know how much it costs?”
“Oh, I don’t know: a bus’ll probably run you one-fifty, maybe. Air, maybe four hundred bucks, cheaper if you can get a special deal.”
Fatyma looked shocked. “So much? I didn’t know it costed so much.”
“You don’t have it, huh?”
; “No. I have only twenty-two dollars.”
“You could hitch,” said the woman. She pulled a crumpled pack of Winstons out of her jacket and lit one, offering the pack to Fatyma, who refused with a shy smile.
“Hitch?” Fatyma recalled the word from songs but was unsure of the precise meaning.
“Yeah, bum a ride, Of course, twenty bucks’ll hardly pay for your food, and they’ll probably ask you to kick in for gas and all.” She saw the effect this statement had on the girl and added, “Hey, it ain’t that bad, kid. There’s ways to make money.”
“A job, you mean?”
The woman made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, yeah, sure a job! Look, nobody’s gonna give you a job, you’re on the street. I mean, you got to have an address, a real address, not a shelter or a crash pad. You got to have clothes …” She tapped Fatyma’s little suitcase with her toe. “I mean more than you got. Also, there’s what can you do? And how old you are. How old are you anyway?”
“Sixteen.” Fatyma lied.
“Yeah, I’m eighteen and they won’t look at me. I mean, face it, they’re out to fuck you any way they can. I’m Cindy, by the way.”
“I’m Fat—I mean, Franny. So what do you do? I mean to make money.”
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Panhandle. Sell, stuff. Boost from stores. How come you split?” Blank look. “I mean left home. You from out of town?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Oh, yeah, Brooklyn. I’m from upstate. So … your folks give you a hard time, huh?”
“I am a whore, so my father was going to marry me to an old man.” She shrugged. “I escaped.”
“Wait a minute, you’re a whore?”
“Yes, like you.” She smiled.
Cindy’s face hardened up. “Hey. I’m not saying I ain’t done tricks, but I’m no whore, and I ain’t gonna be no whore, let’s get that straight.”
“You do tricks?”
Cindy blew out a cloud of smoke from both nostrils, like a dragon. Fatyma looked on with admiration and wondered if she should have accepted a cigarette. “Yeah, everybody does it once in a while, on the street. The men’re there. God, are they there! It’s no big deal. Why, you thinking of tricking yourself?”
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