The Informant

by Marc Olden

  She leaned back to see his face. “Queers?”

  He shrugged, shaking his head. “Feel bad. Want to be with some … be with you.”

  “Edward, you want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head, closed his eyes, squeezing out tears. “My whole fucking life. But who wants to talk about that? Who the hell wants to listen?”

  She helped him to the couch. Did he have an argument with his wife again? Was the department on him? Had a friend been killed? So many things went wrong in his world. So many things.

  Katey lay down on the couch, wept silently, then suddenly fell asleep.

  Margaret Soames stroked his face gently, patted his hair. After removing his topcoat, shoes, and the .38 from his belt holster, she covered him with a blanket, then sat a long time watching him sleep. When she finally went to bed, the sky over Manhattan was streaked with the gray and pale yellow of dawn.

  6

  LYDIA SCREAMED.

  “Don’t! Don’t! Oh, my God, René, you’re killing her! Stop!”

  Brutally shoving Lydia to the floor, René Vega rushed toward Shana Levin, who cringed and wept, backing away from him. Shana was René’s woman, and it was nobody’s business about him coming down on her. She’d earned the beating.

  Shana was twenty-four, a pretty social worker whose long blond hair now hid her red, tearstained face. She turned to run in the small apartment, tripping over a chair and yelping, arms out stiff in front of her to break the fall. He was crazy. Insane. How could she love him?

  René crouched over her, small fists punching her shoulders and back. He was going to really give it to this rich Jew bitch. She squealed in pain, drawing her legs up, covering her face with her forearms.

  Lydia pulled René backward and down to the floor, and Shana crawled away quickly, sobbing, coughing; then she was on her feet and into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind her. René Vega, twenty-four, small, and so extraordinarily handsome that on the street he was called Pretty René, lay on his side breathing heavily and glaring at the bathroom door as though it were a hated enemy.

  That rich bitch had to learn, man. She just had to.

  Olga, Lydia’s five-year-old daughter, was also weeping. She stood in the doorway to the bedroom, wiping her eyes with the backs of two chubby hands.

  “Oh, God … oh, mi Olga.” Lydia ran to the child, bent down and hugged her tightly, whispering to her in Spanish, stroking her dark brown hair.

  Standing quickly, her child behind her, Lydia turned to René. She wasn’t afraid of him; when it came to protecting Olga, Lydia wasn’t afraid of anybody. Besides, René liked the both of them, bringing Olga presents like today, taking her to the movies, and rowing on the lake in Central Park, remembering Olga’s birthday, and even lending Lydia money when things were going bad. René had never laid a hand on Lydia; she was his cousin, and in a sense, his older sister and mother as well.

  Lydia shouted at him. “You are in my house! My house, and you frighten my child, you beat a woman, and my child must see this! René, I don’t like it, I won’t have it, you hear me?”

  She had her hands on her hips, chin up and aimed at him as he sat on the floor. One day René was going to kill somebody. Lydia was certain of it.

  He’d met Shana Levin in Attica, where she’d been a social worker and René had been serving time for robbery and assault with intent to kill. Shana, from a well-to-do Jewish family in Albany, had helped René to get released on parole, then quit her job to follow him to Manhattan. René treated her like dirt, and she continued to love him, to give him money, to overlook the other women.

  Lydia had never let a man treat her like her cousin René was treating Shana. He beat Shana, flaunted his other women, humiliated her in front of people, and she kept coming back for more. Today’s argument had been over nothing.

  Shana had been defending her cooking, while René had insisted she couldn’t boil water. She was an awful cook, he said, and that was all there was to it. Except there had been more. One minute the two were talking calmly, and the next minute René was shouting, on his feet, punching Shana. He was Cuban and didn’t like women disagreeing with him.

  Lydia wondered when Shana was going to get smart. But didn’t Lydia have her own troubles at the moment? Wasn’t she working as an informant for federal drug agents, doing the one thing no one on the street could ever forgive or forget? Wasn’t Lydia being used by men like Neil Shire? If Shana’s life was in danger from a man, then so was Lydia’s.

  Pretty René stood up, pushing his pink shirt down into tight-fitting brown pants. He looked younger than twenty-four, a gorgeous child regretting the ugliness of seconds ago.

  “Lydia, I’m sorry. I … I …” He looked down at the floor. It was as though something huge and dark lived inside of him, taking control of him whenever it wanted, forcing him into a brutality he couldn’t believe belonged to him.

  They embraced. He smelled of lime cologne. René was blood, family, something that would always matter to a Cuban. Family ties were stronger than steel, stronger than any law on earth.

  She leaned away from him, a hand patting his dark curly hair.

  “Go to her. Go.”

  René looked at the closed bathroom door. “I don’t know why I do it. It gets me into prison, into trouble, and I don’t understand.” He frowned. “Maybe we can go away. We went to Canada for a few days, remember? Everything was nice. Trees, lakes, good food. We had a good time. I dropped a package off in Toronto, and that gave me plenty of money.”

  René was now a mule for a middle-level Cuban cocaine dealer called Blind Man.

  Blind Man was seventy-three, totally blind, rich from dealing cocaine and heroin, and he played excellent chess, using a board and pieces he had designed himself. By feeling under the chessboard and touching protruding pieces, Blind Man was able to tell where each piece was.

  After he had someone killed, Blind Man always had an object belonging to the victim brought to him so that he could feel it, smell it, caress it with his long fingers. The rumor was that Blind Man used Brooklyn churches to stash his drugs and that he liked “chickens,” teenage boy prostitutes a lieutenant would pick up and bring back to him.

  “René, how come you’re working for two people?” Lydia lit a cigarette, eyeing René who continued to stand in the middle of her small living room staring at the bathroom door.

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “You’re working for two people. Blind Man and this big thing with blacks and Cubans.” Lydia didn’t want to betray her cousin, but she didn’t ever want to go back to jail. She’d been there, eaten the inedible food, been beaten by guards and inmates, seen the homosexual rapes by bull dikes. Lydia didn’t want to go back to jail as long as she lived, and she didn’t want to be separated from Olga, either.

  “I’m not really working for two people.” René didn’t take his eyes from the door. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He loved Shana; he just couldn’t understand this craziness in himself.

  “The other deal’s not going down for a while. The priest is still collectin’ the money. It’s a lot of bread he’s got to get up. Got to talk with people here, in other cities, out of the country. So I got time yet. So I’m working for Blind Man meantime.”

  “Priest. Priest.” Lydia tapped René on the shoulder, offering him a cigarette. “I know everybody, but I don’t know anybody named Priest.”

  “He’s not named Priest, he is a priest, a Catholic priest.” René flicked open a slim gold lighter, thumbing it into flame.

  Lydia lifted both eyebrows. “You’re kidding. A real priest in dope? You’re kidding me.”

  René ignored her, walking toward the bathroom door.

  Lydia blew a spear of smoke after him, narrowing her brown eyes to bright hard slits. A real priest in dope. Well, on the street anything’s possible, and in dope, you just never know, you just never know. And this real priest, he was in charge of collecting money to pay for the
Cuban-black deal.

  Who was this real priest working for? Something for Neil Shire and that cold cop with the long nose to follow up. Lydia felt her heart beat faster. She had something hot with that news, she could feel it. Most of the time, being a snitch depressed her. She’d never done it before, and she didn’t like people who did. They were finks, betrayers, Judases.

  But for some reason, right now she felt good, as though she’d done something important. She’d heard of people getting off on being informants, but she’d never believed that.

  René leaned against the bathroom door, smoke curling up from the cigarette in a corner of his mouth as he whispered to Shana on the other side.

  Lydia felt a tug on her slacks. Olga. “Mommy?”

  “Sí, mi corazón.”

  “Don’t ever leave me, please? Stay with me.”

  Lydia felt a coldness in her stomach. “Are you afraid I will leave?”

  “I want you to take care of me,” said Olga. “Nobody else.”

  Lydia bent down, hugging the child. Turning, she looked at René, his head hanging down as he continued whispering to the woman he loved and had beaten.

  “Mommy won’t leave you. Not ever.”

  Lydia thought it smarter to wait until René and Shana left before telephoning Neil Shire.

  7

  STANDING ON TIPTOE, NEIL Shire reached as far back as he could on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, fingers stretching for his .38. Hidden there, it was out of reach of his four-year-old daughter, Courtenaye, and out of sight of his wife, Elaine, who loathed guns, shuddering at the sight of one as though it were a hissing cobra ready to strike.

  Keeping his back to Elaine, who sat on the bed behind him, Neil quickly examined the gun. Safety on, empty chamber under the hammer so that if he accidentally dropped the gun, it wouldn’t go off and kill somebody. Most important of all, there was only one bullet in it.

  The decision to carry just one bullet had been made shortly after Neil had become an agent. That’s when he’d first heard of agents having their guns taken away in a struggle and used against them. Often the agent had managed to get off one shot before he lost his piece; after that, trouble.

  Neil had vowed that would never happen to him. He’d get off his one shot, and if that didn’t stop the man or men coming at him, at least nobody was going to grab Neil’s piece and burn him with it.

  Tonight when he turned to face Elaine, the .38 was in his waistband, left side, hidden under a new black leather jacket he’d bought two days ago.

  “Lydia has excellent taste. The jacket fits you well.” Elaine Shire crossed her legs, smoothing her floor-length dark blue velvet skirt. The compliment she had just paid her husband was said in a careful voice, and she sounded as though her mind was on something else entirely, not Neil. She was thirty, a small, pretty woman with short, frizzed brown hair.

  Disappointment with herself, her marriage, her life, had made her develop the habit of staring carefully at people she met to decide as quickly as possible whether or not they too would eventually disappoint her. As a result, people encountering Elaine Shire for the first time thought she was alert, intelligent, and interested in them.

  She sat on the bed wearing the finest skirt she owned, along with a white silk Pierre Cardin blouse, her doll-like face expertly made up, eyebrows painfully plucked for what should have been an evening at a Lincoln Center revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. But Lydia Constanza had just telephoned, and now Neil was on his way from their Gramercy apartment to meet her uptown. There would be no theater tonight. Good-bye Willie Loman.

  Elaine Shire fought to hide her anger, hurt, disappointment.

  Neil, knowing how she felt, decided not to answer her remark about the black leather jacket. He’d bought it because Lydia had said he didn’t have enough “flash” going for him. So far on their buys, Neil had worn the suit jacket and tie usually required in the bureau’s office. On the street, he should be dressing differently, something he hadn’t thought about too much in his haste to get back out there.

  At Lydia’s suggestion, he was growing his hair longer, had bought blue-tinted glasses, some colorful shirts, the black leather jacket, and he wasn’t wearing ties on a buy anymore. Once, he’d even gone out on the street in red-white-and-blue sneakers. Lydia had approved.

  He cleared his throat, looking at Elaine. He could tell when she was pissed. First she stopped talking to him, then she began chewing her lower lip and staring off at something in the distance. After that, it got worse, and right now he wanted to get uptown and meet Lydia before the shit hit the fan in his own home.

  “Well, well, and oh my.” Elaine exhaled, eyes on the ceiling, as though an answer to the problem lay up there. “I suppose I should thank whatever cosmic force gave me this relative peace of the past few months. We do live in an ever-changing world, and mine, it seems, has suddenly changed. Or has it become what it always was? Alas and alack, I’m not too sure.”

  She pulled a cigarette from her purse, fitted it into a black-and-gold holder, and lit it with a thin silver lighter.

  Neil wasn’t in the mood to give the usual “try-and-understand-it’s-my-job” speech. “Sorry. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you will. Unfortunately, this particular performance of Mr. Miller’s finest will be theatrical history by then. This wouldn’t be another of your Lydia the friendly tipster’s no-shows, would it?”

  “Ill find out soon enough when I get there.” If Elaine was speeding full speed toward total bitchery tonight, Neil couldn’t blame her. She was being cheated out of something by one of Neil’s informants, a species of humanity Elaine ranked below child molesters. Like everyone else, Elaine saw virtue only in a reflection of herself.

  Which meant that since she could not imagine herself informing, she could not condone informing.

  The crack about Lydia’s no-shows was a reference to a pair of buys Lydia had arranged where no one showed up. Neil knew how unreliable everyone was in the world of dope. Elaine, who could not imagine herself in that world, did not understand anything about it. Nor did she want to.

  On another buy, the connection had appeared, glared at Lydia and Neil before deciding no, he wasn’t in any mood to deal. The connection had been suspicious, afraid that Neil was the law, and seconds later, the connection leaped up, spilling drinks and almost knocking over a table before rushing out of the bar and into the night. No-shows. No-buys. That was as much a part of working the street as scoring drugs and having something to take back to the lab. You copped, you looked good. You came up empty, and you lived with it.

  For the past month, Neil, Katey, and the other two agents working Lydia were learning more about her, learning to trust her, knowing she was determined to stay out of jail and with her daughter, and because of it was feeding them the best information she could. Those no-shows upset Lydia. She had to be questioned about the people who didn’t show, not just by Neil and his team, but by other people in the bureau.

  Afterward, Neil had been the one to spend two hours with a weeping Lydia, calming her down, cooling her out, telling her the questioning about the no-shows were necessary. The bureau didn’t like surprises.

  Neil had talked to her, taking his time, working her right, and when it was over, she believed him. Her bond wouldn’t be revoked; she was still free, if you could call it that.

  Joe Caracas, the Cuban who’d been her partner in the attempted robbery of the Broadway check-cashing place, was in New Jersey and also out on bail, avoiding Lydia on his lawyer’s advice, which was fine as far as Neil was concerned. For the time being, Neil, who hadn’t been in New York long enough to be known on the street, was working only with Lydia. No other informants, no other cases. This kept Neil from making arrests and eventually being identified as an agent. On the street he was Hundred Dollar Man, a young Italian buying for other Italians.

  The four buys Lydia and Neil had made so far were good, nothing less than twenty
percent. Neil was meeting people through Lydia, people in dope who knew other people in dope. There was no telling how high Neil could go if he didn’t rush things, if he was patient, shrewd, and stayed alive.

  What’s more, there was something to what Lydia had said about blacks and Cubans teaming for a super deal. At some of the places Lydia had taken Neil to, remarks had been dropped.

  From a black dealer: “Ain’t got nothin’ now, babycakes, but I gon’ be holdin’ heavy come later. Somethin’s gonna go down that make your head swim.”

  Another black dealer: “Money’s gatherin’ like there ain’t no tomorrow. Ain’t this much green in the park, dude. Y’all keep in touch, we be ready to talk on you, Mr. Hunnerd Dollar Man.”

  At one after-hours club, while Lydia and Neil were waiting to cop, a tall Cuban with thick glasses spoke to her in Spanish, and when he finished, both of them laughed. After he’d left their table, Lydia had whispered to Neil, “He asked me if I had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He needs it for his share in that big thing. He’s involved.”

  Involved. The big one, the deal that Neil knew next to nothing about, began to take hold of him, and he dreamed about it, fantasized about it, began to consider it his deal, the one that he and only he had to crack.

  Lydia pointed out Cubans who were leaning across tables to whisper to blacks, people who ordinarily would be dealing dope among their own, but who were now meeting and talking in the places Lydia took Neil to. And because of her, men accepted Neil, saying things in front of him they never would have said if they knew who he was. If they knew who he was, he could have been killed, a fact that turned him on.

  He looked at his wife. Still pretty, still sexually exciting, still against his world and everything in it. He said, “Did you remind Courtenaye again about the phone?”

  “Yes, I told her.” Elaine held his glance for a long time. “It’s Daddy’s work, I told her, and she is never to touch it.”