by David Gordon
“Right,” Joe said. “Smart.”
“Except I didn’t forget, did I? Not really. I mean, I put it out of my mind and time went by. But every so often I’d be sitting in a bar or at some rock show and I’d have one too many. Or ten too many. And I’d look around at all those normal fucking people laughing and talking and dancing and this voice in my head would say: You’ve killed more people than anybody in here. You are the most lethal motherfucker in this place.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drank more. Until that stopped working. Then I channeled it into my work.”
“What do you do?”
“Paint mostly. You?”
“I’m on personal leave from my job as a strip-club bouncer.”
Frank chuckled. “Sounds perfect. Nothing relieves the tension like knocking around a few drunken fools. I’d ask to hire on if it wasn’t for this knee. Maybe after Uncle Sam gives me a new one.” He leaned on his cane and slowly hoisted himself up with a sigh. Joe stood, too.
“None of my business,” he asked, “but doesn’t that knee make it hard to paint? Aren’t you climbing ladders all day or on your knees?”
Frank laughed. “Nah. I’m not that kind of painter.” He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a card. “Here. Come by the studio sometime and see.” He pointed the cane at a black Lexus that had pulled up to the curb while they were talking. “I think your ride is here.”
“Mine?” Joe was expecting Cash in his white Bimmer. Then Nero stepped out and nodded at Joe. He opened the rear door and waited. “I guess you’re right,” Joe said. “See you around, Frank.”
Frank nodded. “Take it easy, Joe.” He watched Joe cross the divide to where the black car idled, engine throbbing, the figure of another man dimly visible in the dark interior. He turned west and began walking, leaning on the cane.
*
“Hey, Joe,” Nero said as he approached. “Cash said we could find you here.” He pulled a paper parcel from his pocket. “He said to give you this and tell you Dr. Z says a cup with meals and before bed at night.”
“Thanks, Nero.” He took the packet and got in back, where Gio was waiting. Nero shut the door.
“You look good,” Gio said. “Rested. Well fed.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I feel a lot better. Sorry again about all that.”
Gio waved it off. “Forget it. It’s handled.” He smiled. “Or fingered … right Nero?” Nero laughed and nodded as he got in, shutting his door and putting on his belt. “But the question now is, how much better do you feel?” Gio asked, peering at him carefully. “Good enough to go back to work?”
“Tonight?” Joe shrugged. “Sure I guess. I’ve got to drink this tea, but I can get some hot water at the club.”
“That’s not the kind of work I had in mind.” Gio said, as Nero piloted the car into the flow of traffic.
PART II
11
They drove to Long Island City, a onetime industrial wasteland, first transformed into an art colony and then recolonized by the new corporate towers that now populated the riverfront of this westernmost bit of Queens. They rode down a potholed road, to be repaved no doubt when the half-built skyscraper it led to was complete. It stood now exposed in its raw form, sheathed in glass from the waist down, the upper half a skeleton of steel. On the jagged top, a crane perched, like a gigantic beak or robotic claw. Standing in the barren construction site, it dominated the landscape like a fortress dropped here from space. The western sun lit the glass in a blaze of red and gold and orange. It glittered like a half-hatched dragon climbing from its shell. A guy in a yellow hard hat and orange vest opened the gate as they arrived, then chained it behind them. Gio’s family owned the trucking and concrete companies working on the site and also controlled the union electricians and ironworkers and, through a shell corporation, held a sizable stake in the real estate on which it stood, which they’d bought up as polluted badlands. But work here had ceased for the day, and they drove quickly across the quiet site, past piled materials, stuffed dumpsters, sleeping cement mixers, and the trailer where a security guard sat reading the paper and minding his own business.
Nero drove through the open hole where the doors would go and entered the ground floor of the building, a raw, cavernous space with concrete floors and pylons rising to the rafters. Cables hung like vines, stacks of drywall sat on pallets and bright-yellow forklifts waited like abandoned toys. Big Eddie, incongruous in a spotless blue suit and brown dress shoes, like a tenant who had moved in too early, stood beside the freight elevator, a large cage in the central core of the structure, a tower of steel that would hold the elevators, bathrooms, garbage chutes and electronics rooms one day. Nero nosed the car into the elevator and stopped. Eddie pulled the door down from a strap and ran the elevator, which shuddered, hummed, and then began to rise.
Inside the car, Nero stared straight ahead, hands on the wheel as if he were driving. Gio and Joe stared out their windows at the passing empty floors. Without walls, each was a landscape or diorama, a dusty forest of pillars or cave of concrete stalactites, beyond which the glass walls framed a stunning view of the river and the Midtown Manhattan skyline. They didn’t speak. The elevator rose beyond the last glassed-in floor and now they were floating through space it seemed, with light and air all around them, as though they were moving up the stages of a rocket on the launchpad or climbing a ladder to nothing. Gio’s phone rang.
“Carol,” he told Joe. Joe nodded, looking back out his window as Gio spoke into the phone. “Hi honey. You get my message?” He moved the phone away from his ear as a distorted voice blared out. “I know,” he said. “I know, I’m sorry. Something came up at work. Just something. At work. An emergency. Well, tell them I had an emergency at work. Okay. I will call when I’m on my way. Yeah, just order it and I’ll pick it up.”
He turned off the phone. “Parent-teacher night,” he told Joe. “Nora is doing poorly at trig and I’m supposed to discuss it with the teacher. I don’t even know what the fuck trig is.”
“Beats me,” Joe said.
“Guess they didn’t cover that at Harvard.”
“I majored in literature and philosophy. Then they kicked me out, remember?”
Nero spoke up. “It’s short for trigonometry, Boss.”
“Thanks Nero, I knew that. I mean what the fuck is it?”
“It’s the study of triangles, Boss. A branch of mathematics that deals with the sides of triangles and with the functions of angles. I got a B plus in it.”
“Triangles? That’s it? A whole course? So why isn’t there like a class for square-ometry? Circle-ometry?”
“I think that’s just regular geometry, Boss.”
“Whatever. I’m talking to Joe here.”
“Sorry, Boss.”
“Point is,” Gio continued, “there’s going to be drama and Carol’s pissed I’ll miss it. I’m picking up Chinese food for after, though. That always cheers everyone up.”
“Nice,” Joe said as the elevator lurched to a stop. Eddie raised the door and Nero eased out slowly and joined a row of parked cars—Benzes, Caddies, Lexi—all expensive and new. The drivers stood together, smoking and talking. The rest of the floor was empty and unwalled, a huge platform with a constant wind blowing in off the river.
“Upstairs,” Eddie said and gestured toward a metal flight of steps. Joe and Gio went up while Nero lit a smoke and went to join the others, who were already greeting him by name. The top floor was roofless and open on all four sides. Steel girders stuck up and the giant crane loomed over them, its arm hanging over the edge of the roof. Although the platform was solid and the edge of the building many yards away on all sides, the sudden exposure to light and wind, the feeling of openness all around, the limitless sky above and the nearly limitless city spread in every direction below all gave one a rush of vertigo, a desire to crouch lower, to touch the floor. Instead, Gio led Joe to a temporary prefab shed that had been installed as an office for the p
eople supervising the job, a windowless, plastic-walled room up on cinder blocks with rough wooden steps and a couple of porta-potties sitting beside it like old-time outhouses. Gio opened the door and they went in.
Five people sat around a few folding tables that had been pushed together, the surface clear except for a couple of unused ashtrays and a case of unopened waters. The desks and shelves on the other side of the room were heaped with papers, files, and blueprints, suggesting this area had been hastily cleared. At the head of the table sat Little Maria in stretch jeans, a red blouse, red heels and lips and nails, gold hoop earrings, her eyes and hair shining black. Uncle Chen, the Chinese boss of Flushing sat beside Menachem “Rebbe” Stone, the Hasidic crime boss, both very old and dressed in black, though only Menachem was in a skullcap. Alonzo was there, in the same suit as this morning, looking just as fresh. Pat White, the last of the Irish Westies who once ruled Hell’s Kitchen but were still deep into politics, loan-sharking, and gambling as well as contract hits, was dressed like a retiree in a Knicks cap, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, and gold pants. Anton, the Russian from Brighton Beach, was in a black shirt unbuttoned halfway down to reveal gold chains and tattoos. He was the only one smoking—Russian cigarettes with cardboard filters that surrounded him with acrid fumes.
“Hello everybody and thanks for making the trip,” Gio said. “Sorry about the climb.” The group chuckled. “I needed to find a safe place on short notice, and unless anybody spotted a helicopter, I don’t think we need to worry about being heard or seen together here.” Gio and Joe sat down side by side at the end of the table. “Maria asked for this meeting, so I’m going to let her explain things.”
“Thank you, Gio. Thank you all. And thank you, Joe, for coming. I know you just get back from vacation. I hope you had a nice time.” Joe nodded and smiled. “Then I will get right to it. A couple weeks ago I got an offer. Forty kilos of puro, Persian White coming in from Afghanistan. But I never heard of this seller, so I make some calls. Turns out, one of my regular connections got hit and now they trying to sell the dope. So I say no, I won’t touch it. But anda el Diablo, this little bitch who works for me, name Carlo, he goes behind my back and sets it up. Wants to be his own boss now, the matatan.”
Uncle Chen shrugged. “We all have traitors to deal with sometimes, Maria. But this sounds like a private problem.”
Maria smiled big. “Don’t misunderstand. I will be very happy to chop this mama guevo into pieces with my machete and feed him to my dog. But Carlo, when like you say, I have a private talk with him last night, he tell me the Persian is already here in New York. So somebody is going to buy it. I can’t chop up everyone.”
Chuckles ripped around the table. Gio spoke: “But what’s this got to do with Joe? When we gave him authority to operate across all our territories, we made it clear. He doesn’t do hits. Or turf wars. Or take out rival drug gangs. This isn’t his kind of thing.”
“This is a horse of a different color, Gio.” It was Pat. “I passed Maria’s info along to my pals in the military. There’s no question. They belong to an Al-Qaeda splinter group whose MO is to raid the opium pipelines then use the money to fund terrorism. They blew up a US base in Africa last year. Six months ago they took out a UN convoy. Three months ago they blew up a marketplace in Syria and killed a dozen civilians. Now it looks like they’re here.”
“Let’s all put the word out to our people to find who’s moving the shipment,” Alonzo said. “Then just take their shit. Junkies drool for that Persian dope. And I guarantee not a penny to fucking Al-Qaeda.”
Anton cleared his throat, coughing loudly, and blew smoke across the room. Gio’s nose twitched. Who would smoke in a room with no windows? “We set the deal up,” he said. “Have this Carlo call. Then like Alonzo says, we take their dope and bury them on Staten Island.”
“He’s got a point,” Gio admitted. “Don’t tell me no one else here can jack a drug dealer besides Joe. And it’s still not his kind of thing.”
Now Menachem raised his hand, and the chatter and chuckling ceased. “There’s more. They are insisting on a special form of payment. They want diamonds.”
“Diamonds?” Alonzo asked. “These are some flash terrorists. Thought they were generally into dressing plain.”
Maria shook her head. “They can’t deal the way we usually do. Who would trust them? And who can they trust? Nobody.” Maria’s business, like most enterprises based on trade, generally came down to relationships. Her connections were men she’d known for decades. A shipment was arranged, and when Maria got word it had landed safely, she transferred funds from her numbered overseas account to someone else’s. She never touched the money or the drugs. Everything ran on trust and friendship, and the special bond between those who, everyone knew, would kill whoever betrayed that trust and friendship. Unlike plenty of straight business people, heavy drug dealers, at least the live ones, mostly kept their word among themselves. But these people were outsiders. No one would take their word for anything, nor could they count on anybody’s goodwill. They were pariahs, even among the outlaws.
“They need something that can’t be traced,” Menachem said. “And they need it liquid. But this much cash isn’t practical. How do they get it out of the country? Check it in their luggage? Four million in diamonds you put in your pocket. And you sell them wherever, Antwerp, Tokyo, Tel Aviv. Or New York. You want a safe, durable, portable asset? Diamonds are the hardest stuff on earth.”
“What about fugazis?” Gio asked. “Get some glass.”
“They’re not fools,” Maria said. “Carlo said they will have an expert to check.”
Alonzo whistled. “Four mil? Sorry folks. Not even the flyest gangsters got that much ice on hand.”
“Who does?” Menachem shrugged. “Only the dealers. And I don’t think they will be interested in donating to the cause.”
Finally, Joe, who’d been sitting back, his chair pushed away from the table, just listening, spoke up: “So what you need then, is for somebody to steal these diamonds, then trade them for the dope, then steal the diamonds back again before they can get them out of the country.”
“You understand, amigo.” Maria nodded at Joe.
“Three separate moves,” Alonzo said.
Anton put his smoke out on the floor, though the ashtray was right there. “And if any of them go sour, those bastards win.”
Menachem nodded. “It’s tricky. But it’s the only way.”
“And we have only one friend tricky enough do it,” Uncle Chen said. He winked at Joe.
Gio shrugged and turned to Joe. “Sorry, but I got to admit. This is starting to sound like your kind of thing after all.”
12
By the time the meeting broke up, Joe had begun sorting out his crew and making plans. Maria would extract all the information Joe needed to impersonate Carlo online and make the connection; his only contact with the seller was email. “And that’s our only lead,” he reminded her. “So I hope he’s still breathing enough to talk.”
“Don’t you worry,” she said and smiled, showing her teeth against the red lips, the wolf inside the grandma. “I always cut the tongue off last.”
Rebbe and Pat would provide information, too, and muscle, committing a man each to Joe’s team. Joe told Alonzo he’d be wanting Juno, since he lived in his domain and Alonzo knew the family. “And I’m sorry you had to clean up that other mess about the fight at the club,” he added.
Alonzo slapped him on the back. “Don’t fret. Your man Gio came and scared the dude so bad that now he thinks he owes me his life, and we own even more of his company. Everybody’s friends again.”
Joe smiled. “You’re welcome, then.”
They shook hands. “Just holler if you need any concert tickets,” Alonzo told him.
Joe wanted Cash, too, as a driver, and Uncle Chen was glad to volunteer him. He was pleased with the way the trip to Jersey had turned out and had heard good reports about Joe from Dr. Z. She treated Uncle Che
n himself for sciatica and back pain among other things, and he channeled money to her clinic through the Triad’s public face, as a community association, to pay for elders in need or FOBs, newcomers fresh off the boat from China.
He also wanted Yelena. That didn’t go over as smoothly.
“That Russian who tore up my joint?” Gio asked him, frowning at the memory.
Joe said, “She’s the best sneak thief I know. And that’s what this job needs.”
Gio turned to Anton. “You know this girl?”
“Yelena the cat?” Anton shrugged. “She is not with us, but she is friends with our friends back in Russia. I hear she is very good to work with. And very bad to work against.”
“What Gio means, I think,” Rebbe put in, “with everyone else involved, one of us here can vouch for them. So this Russian girl. Can she be trusted?”
“I’ve trusted her with my life already, and I’m still here,” Joe said. “With your money?” He shrugged. “We’ll find out.”
Rebbe nodded. “That’s good enough for us, right?” The others nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. “And speaking of money,” he added, “we are not asking you to do this for free. We’re not the government.” Everyone laughed.
“Or socialists,” Anton added. As always, Gio felt he was milking the joke a bit, but he forced a chuckle.
“What you steal you keep,” Gio told him. “That’s only fair. Split it up with your crew.”
“And if the dope is what they say,” Maria added, “I will buy it from you at market rates. Four million.”
“Is that COD?” Joe asked her.