The Informant

by Marc Olden

  Neil said, “Blacks and Puerto Ricans, they do anything. Out where I come from, they only know from white. We’re old-fashioned, conservative. We still do things the old way.”

  “I see.” Cristina Reina waited while Jorge Dávila, to her right, lit the new cigar in her holder. “You sell to teenagers, maybe?”

  Neil, fingers playing with the straps on Lydia’s small rhinestone purse, didn’t look at her. “You sell to nuns, maybe?”

  Lydia started to smile, changed her mind, and cleared her throat instead. She’d passed on what little she’d learned about Cristina Reina from Jorge Dávila, and the important thing Neil had to remember was that Cristina was hard, shrewd, capricious, friendly one minute and vicious the next. Lydia guessed that Jorge Dávila was sleeping with her because he was afraid not to.

  Cristina sighed. “Such a night on which to talk business. I’m hungry. Mmmmm, you know, Jorge, that chili looks good.”

  Jorge Dávila’s smile was quick, weak. “I’ll get you some. Anything else?”

  “Cornbread. A little salad. Yes, we must have a little salad, I think.”

  She smiled at Neil, at Lydia, who smiled back and hoped the night would go fast. Adjusting the dark glasses that hid her still-blackened eyes, Lydia reached for her glass of scotch and milk.

  The six of them—Lydia, Neil, Cristina, Dávila, René Ateyala, and Carlos el Indio—were at the Palace, the floating after-hours club operated by a group of successful Manhattan pimps. Tonight the Palace had been installed on three floors of a brownstone on Seventy-fourth Street and Riverside Drive, and the extent of the Hundred Dollar Man’s reputation in narcotics was seen by the fact Neil had received three separate invitations to come here tonight. The New Year’s Eve party—a hundred and fifty dollars per guest, cash at the door, invitation only, and no exceptions—was to last around the clock, ending at noon the next day, when the Palace would cease to exist until the players—pimps—would again bring it into existence weeks later at a different location.

  Tonight, all three floors were packed with people: with pimps, almost all of whom were black, and their stables of women (black, white, young); with drug dealers, gamblers, loan sharks, hustlers of all sorts, and other night people who lived on excitement and were well connected enough to be invited. Dancing to taped soul and Latin music occupied the first floor, with huge silk-covered pillows against the wall for nondancers to lie back and watch the action.

  The second floor had the food—chili, chicken, ham, ribs, turkey, salads, greens, cornbread, cake, ice cream, and more, most of it cooked on the premises on portable stoves and ovens. Aquariums with dozens of multicolored fish stood on wooden tables against walls now decorated with huge paintings borrowed for the evening.

  Backgammon, blackjack, roulette, and craps were on the third floor, and all tables were jammed. Each of the three floors had a well-stocked bar tended by black bartenders in tuxedos. Music was piped into each floor. Tonight, the partygoers were dressed garishly, fashionably, colorfully, wearing their extremes in clothes, hairdo, and jewelry with assurance and flair, each man and woman in tune with the feeling that the very fact of the Palace was so wrong, it just had to be right. The smell of marijuana was everywhere, and Lydia had heard that up on the third floor, a dealer was giving out free blows of cocaine—tinfoil-wrapped packets, one inch square—as New Year’s gifts to anyone who asked.

  Enrique Ruiz had whispered to Lydia that he’d heard two pimps bragging to each other about their ho’s, their whores, resulting in a bet as to which teenage whore was the better cocksucker, the contest to take place after midnight. That’s when the ho’s, two white teenagers, were to kneel and suck off their respective pimps as a room full of people watched. The pimp who came first won five thousand dollars.

  Just a rumor? Maybe. But with players, you could never tell. They were flashy, always showing off and bragging, always quick to let people know where they were coming from.

  René Ateyala coughed into his fist. He was five feet five inches, a hundred and, ninety-five pounds, a chubby, round-faced man with extremely hairy hands and bushy black eyebrows meeting over a hooked nose. Except for a brown toupee that looked slightly orange in the dim light, the thirty-five-year-old René Ateyala wore all white—suit, shirt, tie, shoes, handkerchief. He’d had six drinks and wasn’t remotely drunk. He didn’t scare Lydia nearly as much as Carlos el Indio, the tall, broad-shouldered, brown-skinned man without an expression on his slant-eyed, flat face. Indio had huge hands that were now folded on the table as though in prayer. He sat still, saying nothing, his shiny black eyes not blinking, not looking in any particular direction, but seeing everyone and everything.

  Lydia knew about him from Jorge Dávila, who said he’d had nightmares of Carlos el Indio coming after him. Carlos the Indian was a killer, a knife man, someone you never annoyed or insulted. He was the reason Cristina Reina could wear her jewelry tonight without worrying about some crazy trying a takeoff. Lydia wondered if even a bullet between the eyes would do more than scratch the big Indian’s skin.

  As for Neil, he was becoming a damn good actor, too. Not anxious, not dumb or uncool, not in a hurry. He was exactly what you had to be when you were scoring dope. He got better each time out, and Lydia was proud of him.

  As Dávila left the table to get chili, Cristina Reina blew smoke after him, then turned back to Neil. “Yesterday you said your people are expanding, moving up. That means money, my friend. That means you got money or you’re lookin’ to get it. I think maybe you need bigger packages than you buying, maybe.”

  “You don’t know what I’m buying,” said Neil, looking at her. “You hear maybe about a few loads here, a few loads there. While people were checking me out, I was checking them out. So now I know who to rely on, and that’s important. To get white, the amount of white my people are gonna need, I’m willing to go anywhere. Some people already talked to me about my problem.”

  “Who?” René Ateyala, on his eighth drink and not a hair on his toupee out of place, puckered up his lips when he spoke, as though blowing a kiss across the table.

  “Some people,” said Neil, winking and smiling at Lydia, who smiled back and took his arm. “They heard about my needs, and they told me to hang on, that sometime in the new year my problems are gonna be solved.”

  “How big are your problems?” asked Cristina Reina. “We never did go into that.”

  Neil scratched his nose with his thumbnail. “No, we didn’t, did we?” Lydia squeezed his arm, her way of saying right on. When you dealt dope, that’s all you had to talk about. You didn’t have to explain anything, so long as you had the right introduction and enough money, and Neil had both.

  “Big problems?” Cristina Reina tried to smile. Lydia decided the woman wasn’t used to doing that.

  “Big enough,” said Neil. “But I think maybe I can solve them. Dávila thought we ought to talk, but I gotta tell you, there’s people in this town, hell, even in this room, who say they can help me out. Some of ’em, I know, are righteous. Just depends on whether they can do weight when I need it.”

  “White. Has to be white, is that correct?” Cristina Reina slid the cigarette holder back into her mouth.

  “Keys.”

  “Oh? How many?”

  “Maybe too much for you.”

  “Could I be the judge of that?”

  Neil dropped the bombshell, just as he told Lydia he would. “We’re getting together two million dollars, maybe more.”

  No one said anything. René Ateyala gently patted his toupee, eyes on Neil, and Cristina Reina froze in place. Two million dollars, maybe more. The Hundred Dollar Man was a very important man, a customer worth having. Lydia felt the excitement, was caught up in it, and held Neil’s arm tighter, riding the wind with him, her heart beating much too fast right now, much too fast.

  Cristina Reina cleared her throat; she wasn’t probing anymore, and she wasn’t feeling Neil out. She became too sweet for Lydia to stand.

  “Nei
l, my friend, have you talked to other people, I mean seriously, to other people?”

  “Not seriously, no. We just decided today to make our move. What the hell, it’s the new year, right? No, lemme be serious. We been planning what we got to do to push out the Mustache Petes, the old guys who still think it’s a big deal to sit around and talk about the time fifty years ago when they were in Chicago and saw Al Capone drive by in a Model T. The old guys want to stay out of narcotics, the young guys feel different. Sure, we got to take on the blacks, Colombians, hell, even you Cubans. First we need the product, and for us it’s always been white. Not brown, not that pink stuff or even that gray stuff with the rocks in it that the Chinese bring in. We need white. We can’t take on the old guys unless we got the product, unless we got a chance to win. Winning means money, so now we got the money, and that means we’re ready to go. We stay out on the island for the time being, maybe the next six months. After that, who knows?”

  Lydia saw René Ateyala nod his large head, completely convinced by Neil’s story. Cristina Reina looked at Neil a long time, which made Lydia nervous. Then Cristina said, “I’d like to do business with you, Neil.”

  Before Neil could answer, Lonnie Conquest and King Raymond came up to him, patted him on the back, slapped palms, smiled, and wished him a happy new year. When they left, Enrique Ruiz came over and did the same, his wife leaning over to kiss Neil on the cheek.

  Seeing the competition, Cristina cleared her throat and said, “I’d like you to come down to Miami, meet my people, talk with us. We can deliver what you need.”

  Neil, playing a hot hand, said, “Why should I go down there? What makes you think I can’t get what I want up here?”

  “I can see that.” Cristina Reina took the cigarette holder from her mouth, ignoring the chili, salad, and cornbread placed in front of her by Jorge Dávila. Lydia knew what was going down. In dope, a good customer was worth his weight in gold. Cristina Reina and John-John Paco wanted to turn over whatever white they got from Mas Betancourt as quickly as possible. Two million dollars equaled a lot of keys. If they could make a deal with Neil, if they could hook onto the Hundred Dollar Man …

  “Neil, I can give you a good price, better than anyone else.”

  “Price, hell. First, let’s talk weight. Twenty, thirty keys is what we’re looking for.”

  Cristina Reina practically climbed up on the table to get to Neil, and Lydia almost laughed out loud.

  Cristina said, “We can do it. And beat anybody else’s price for a load that size. At least five thousand less per key than what anybody in New York can offer you.”

  Neil shrugged. He couldn’t have looked more bored. “Cristina, I want reliable people. I mean, when I go back and tell my people I got something, shit, I damn sure better have it, know what I mean?”

  “I understand. You mean is it definite we can take care of you. I give you my word. It is definite. I don’t have it now, but we will have it, that’s a promise.”

  “When?”

  “March. Maybe early April. Nobody else will have it before then, not as much as you want. March, April definitely.”

  “And what do I do if the load doesn’t come in?”

  “It will come in, believe me when I tell you. For one thing, we got a lot of people working on it. Those black men who just came over to see you—”

  “If you’re going to tell me they’re Kelly Lorenzo’s lieutenants, tell me something I don’t know.”

  Cristina tried to smile again. “Of course. Forgive me. I should have known. Jorge says you get around, which I can see for myself. Do you know that Kelly Lorenzo is here tonight?”

  Cristina almost delivered a full smile this time as she watched the stunned looks on the faces of Lydia and Neil. Jorge Dávila’s mouth dropped open and stayed open. He hadn’t known about Kelly either. But René Ateyala had. The chubby Cuban smiled, finishing another drink, and the huge El Indio said nothing. With his dark brown face no more expressive than carved wood, he continued shredding a pale blue paper hat.

  Neil could only whisper, “Here?”

  Cristina nodded. “I’ve spoken to him, and so has René. Sorry we can’t introduce you, but he’ll be leaving soon, and you can understand he’s not too taken with meeting strangers. But he’s heard of you, he knows who you are from your dealings with his people. One of the things we talked about was this shipment you and I’ve been discussing. We have a particular man working for us on this one. This man will be bringing in some white under diplomatic cover. He himself is a diplomat, naturally, a representative of … well, let’s not go into that. His name really doesn’t matter, but he’s one reason I can guarantee you that we’ll have the product to sell. What do you have to say to that my popular friend?”

  Neil looked at Lydia, raised both eyebrows, and inhaled for a long time. Turning to Cristina, he grinned. “How’s the chili?”

  Her tiny gray eyes were bright as she nodded while pushing the bowl across the table to him. “From me to you. Jorge will get me another.”

  A few minutes before midnight, Neil and Lydia stood on a crowded dance floor, arms around each other, unable to move in any direction, the two of them surrounded by other couples. Lydia whispered, “Think she’s righteous—about Kelly, I mean?”

  “Yeah. She’s not the type to give you a stroke job. Hard bitch. Wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

  “The diplomat. How ’bout him?”

  “Dávila doesn’t know it, but his job’s gonna be to find out who this dude is. I don’t care if he has to spend the new year keeping Cristina happy three times a night. He’s gonna tell us who this gentleman is if it’s the last thing he does.”

  “Might be the last thing he does. She gives me the creeps.”

  “Indio ain’t out of Walt Disney either. Word is he’s put away over fifty people with his trusty little knife. A homicidal Cuban Indian. Just what New York needs.”

  “You beginnin’ to like New York, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Gets to you after a while. Action’s here. You can live more here in a day than some people live elsewhere in a year. Yeah, I’m grooving with it now. Wish Elaine could—”

  Happy New Year!

  Men and women shouted, party horns blared, and from over a speaker came a fast Latin version of “Auld Lang Syne,” complete with bongos and cowbells. Lydia pulled back from Neil, and the two looked at each other; then, without a word, they kissed, leaned away from each other again, then kissed once more, urgently and demanding, and that’s when Neil pulled away, looked down, and shook his head.

  “Lydia, I …”

  “Don’t say anything, Neil. Just hold me. Please?”

  He did.

  Neither spoke again until they returned to their table and to Cristina, Dávila, René Ateyala, and Carlos el Indio. There, the talk quickly went to narcotics, to mutual acquaintances in that business, to the price of Miami hotels in season, to a series of subjects that had nothing to do with Lydia and Neil and what was now on their minds. We’re going as fast as we can to nowhere, she thought. But it’s more than I have ever had in my life.

  And what happens when we leave here tonight? she thought. Does he come back to my place? Oh, God, please help me. What do we do? Dios mío.

  At one-thirty in front of the Palace, in face-stinging January winds, Lydia shivered next to Cristina Reina, who was wrapped in a floor-length silver-fox coat. Neil had gone around the corner to Riverside Drive to get his car. René Ateyala was several feet away on the sidewalk, whispering to two Cuban men, and Carlos el Indio stood tall behind Cristina Reina, who shivered and said, “I’ll be glad to g-get back to Miami. You must get Neil to come down to see us.”

  Lydia was about to reply when she heard tires squealing and Neil’s blue Ford turned the corner and sped past them, the car’s exhaust coughing blue-gray smoke, and it was gone, but not before Lydia screamed, “Neil! Neil!”

  She ran a few steps after the car, stopped, then turned and cried out to
the men and women standing on the sidewalk in the freezing night. “It’s Neil! Neil was in that car!”

  “Wasn’t alone,” said a tall black man in knickers, boots, and a fur jacket.

  “Oh, my God, my God!” Lydia shouted, her face bright with tears that shone in the streetlight “Somebody’s got him!”

  A black voice chuckled. “Mama, maybe he done gone to another party.” A few more people chuckled with him.

  Cristina Reina didn’t laugh. Moving close to Lydia, she said, “Are you sure?”

  “Why would he leave me here? They took him. Do something, do something!”

  Cristina’s voice was low, hard. “Calm down. We don’t want attention. Keep quiet Come with me. Are you sure that was Neil you saw?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me.”

  Lydia, more frightened than she had ever been in her life, followed Cristina Reina back inside the Palace.

  30

  OLIVER BARTH DID ALL of the talking.

  “Lydia’s story is, she panicked, came unglued, couldn’t handle it. She and Neil are close, that’s no secret, so maybe she’s righteous about her reaction, but we are going to look into that. We got an agent’s life at stake here, not to mention a super case that we can’t afford to have pulled from under us. If the people who grabbed Neil learn he’s an agent, he’s cold meat, dead before the sun goes down. What that will do to the Betancourt thing he’s been working on for four months, I hate to tell you. That five hundred keys of white is going to disappear, we won’t even get a sniff of it. The newspapers will slice into our tender parts with razor blades, and that’s nothing compared to what Congress is going to do. Just pass the word down: don’t think of anything except getting Neil Shire back alive as soon as possible.

  “Justice has authorized us to pay the ransom. For those of you who don’t know about the note, just listen. Lydia Constanza says she was upset after it happened, so she stayed at the Palace talking to Cristina Reina, Jorge Dávila, René Ateyala, Enrique Ruiz, and several other narcotics traffickers, Lydia says she arrived back at her own apartment a little after four in the morning, first stopping next door at her neighbor, Mrs. Sánchez, to pick up her daughter, Olga. The note was waiting for Lydia under her door. Not much to it, just three sentences: ‘One hundred thousand for the Hundred Dollar Man. We call you 24 hours. Money or he dies.’ That’s it, gentlemen. No signature, and the words cut out of newspapers and magazines, then Scotch-taped to a piece of paper torn from a cheap five-and-ten notebook. Neil played his role too well. Somebody out there really thinks Neil is a big-time dealer, so they’ve grabbed him and are holding him for a big score.