The Hard Stuff

by David Gordon

  “You. Lambe bolsa! This man has some questions.”

  He blinked up at them in abject terror.

  “Can you let him out?” Joe asked. “I need him to email.”

  Maria took a small key from her apron pocket and opened the padlock. The kid stepped up with a leash in his hand and opened the door of the cage.

  “Crawl, bitch,” Maria said, and the man crawled out, trembling as the dog went crazy.

  “Duque!” Maria yelled, and the dog sat, tag wagging happily again. The kid attached the leash to the choke collar and offered it to Joe.

  “Just bring him to the desk,” Joe said. The boy walked him over, dragging him along. Maria kicked him in the ass with her pointy shoe. Yelena stood to the side, watching curiously. The man eased himself carefully up into the chair, and Joe pushed over the open laptop. He spoke calmly, looking the man in the eye.

  “Hi Carlo. I know you’re scared and in pain. But I need you to focus. If you take care of this, then maybe Maria will turn you over to me, and I can see about getting you out of here. We’ll send you into exile.”

  The man looked up at Joe and then over to Maria. There was mostly fear in his eyes and confusion at being addressed like a person again, politely even. But Joe also saw a tiny flicker of hope. Deep down of course, Carlo knew he was doomed, but the human mind being what it is, he would not be able to resist the temptation of hope.

  “Right, Maria?” Joe asked.

  She shrugged disdainfully. “Sure, what do I care? Take this piece of trash when I’m done with him. Dead or alive is the same to me.”

  “See?” Joe said. “Now, I need you to email the seller and tell him you want the dope. Tell him you have a plan to get the diamonds and will have them day after tomorrow. That’s important. And ask if the stuff is here yet.”

  Carlo went online and opened the email account. Joe read through the emails already there, just a few exchanges, setting the terms. While Joe coaxed him, Carlo typed:

  I am ready to do this. I found a way to get the payment Friday.

  Is the product in NY?

  “That’s good, Carlo,” Joe said. “Now send.”

  Carlo sent the email. Joe got a sheet of paper and had Carlo write down the email addresses and password, then folded it and put it in his pocket. He patted Carlo on the shoulder.

  “Good job, Carlo. Thanks,” he said. Carlo nodded, eyes still floating wildly around the room. Joe turned to the others. “I’ll check later to see if he answers,” he said, though what he meant was that he’d have Juno check. He didn’t even have a computer.

  There was a soft knock on the door and the kid stuck his head out to see what it was. “Dinner’s ready,” he announced.

  Maria clapped her hands twice. “Let’s eat. Come on everybody.” To the kid she said: “Put this pendejo in his cage.”

  The kid grabbed the leash roughly and, in a panic, Carlo got to his knees and began to crawl quickly back to the cage. Joe and Yelena watched awkwardly as Maria locked it. Just then, the computer dinged as an email came in. Joe checked. It was a reply:

  The product will be ready when you are.

  Joe looked at his watch. “It’s 4:00 a.m. in Afghanistan.”

  Yelena nodded. “You are thinking they are here.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said as they started in to dinner, the kid holding the door. “I think they are somewhere in the city and I think they already have the dope.”

  *

  Felix loved New York. Of course, he knew, who didn’t? The whole world loved New York. Even people who deplored the United States, who despised Americans, if you mentioned New York would say, “I love it!” But Felix loved it in a special way. As the kind of man who at least in his youth thought of himself as an international playboy (and had actually spent many prepubescent nights feverishly poring over that very magazine in many of its international editions), Felix saw New York as the big league, a prize to win, a trophy to conquer.

  He was the bastard son of a wealthy Jordanian and his French mistress, which was actually not a bad thing to be. While the legitimate sons got the property and prestige, they also lived under the rule of a deeply authoritarian and religiously conservative (if, it goes without saying, totally hypocritical) patriarch. Felix was brought up by his mother in a lovely apartment in Paris. True, once his father dropped her, his mother declined rapidly, first into alcoholism and obesity—inhaling chocolate and pâté like it was crack—then into her own brand of extreme Catholicism. But that was just another kind of freedom to Felix: he flunked out of the best Swiss boarding schools, was sent down from an excellent college at Oxford, failed upward through several very brief and silly careers in marketing and music promotions, all without consequences. His parents were indifferent, and the allowance checks kept coming.

  Then a young prostitute turned up dead: drugged and strangled. She was not the first, but this one was not an undocumented sex worker; she was the wild child of a French politician. Suddenly, Felix was on the run with no money and no passport. And the checks stopped. In fact his accounts were frozen. And his father, or rather his father’s staff, stopped answering his calls.

  Those were desperate times for Felix, but he was a resourceful fellow: charming, clever, ruthless, and, after some frightening experiences, he found that the world of fake documents and shady border crossings suited him quite nicely. Along with international playboy, the other thing he turned out to be was a born middleman, specifically a smuggler. Not that he strapped drugs to his stomach or shoved them up his ass and got on a plane—that was for suckers. He made the deal, charmed the principals, made the connections, and when need be, cut out the competition. The big-time heroin trade was, he found, a remarkably steady business. The problems were generally geopolitical or climatological, matters of corrupt officials or delayed shipments, not far from what he imagined an oil executive dealt with. Pretty soon he was shepherding product from Afghanistan up into Italy and beyond, living the life of luxury he enjoyed so much and with plenty of opportunity to develop and indulge his more extreme tastes as well. After all, smuggled flesh was as cheap as smuggled dope, maybe cheaper.

  Then one night in Kandahar, sitting on a hotel terrace drinking tea, he was approached by two bearded men around his age. They wore local clothes—the long tunic-like khet over the loose, pleated partug, and turbans—but spoke to him in French to avoid eavesdroppers. They knew who he was. That is, they knew who he really was, his true name and the crime for which he was still wanted in France, as well as most of what he’d done since. For a moment of stark terror, Felix thought they were undercover cops or some kind of spies there to arrest him. Then, to his relief, he understood: they were terrorists.

  Of course they didn’t put it that way, exactly. They asked him if he knew who Zahir was. He did. Zahir al Zilli, Zahir the Shadow, was known to everyone in the trade, if only as a rumor. Felix had never seen him and didn’t believe those who claimed they had. Zahir—no one knew his true family names or, for that matter, if his first was really Zahir—was a bandit, a mujahedeen who had been preying on the opium warlords, using high-tech weapons and trained fighters to seize their shipments of heroin and then, he’d heard, using the money to fund attacks by jihadi. That’s why they called him the Shadow: he was dark, obscure, no one knew his face, and yet he was right behind you.

  Now he wanted Felix to help him expand his operation and use his sales connections to move their product. Felix was happy to oblige. The threat of exposure got his attention, but he was easily persuaded by the very generous rate Zahir offered, the volume of his traffic, his global ambitions, and his power, power that was now at Felix’s disposal: money, cars, apartments, passports, and credit cards. He sent him a driver and assistant, Armond, a loyal true believer, who obeyed without question. He also sent him a bodyguard and enforcer, Vlad, who was like his one-man army, his Goliath, or maybe his Godzilla. And Vlad, as it happened, liked doing to boys what Felix liked doing to girls; they got on well.

  I
n fact, Felix was self-aware and, despite getting kicked out of such fine schools, educated enough to realize Zahir was a substitute for his own father: powerful, remote, absent, severe, and in his own strange way, godly. Except Zahir was far more powerful—and far more remote and severe. He was not just godly. He was God. This was blasphemy, of course, and Zahir himself would never permit it. He’d cut out the tongues of idolaters and blasphemers. But while Felix understood that Zahir and his men were on a holy mission to restore the true caliphate, fighting in the name of Allah, for Felix, Zahir himself was a more believable god, one he could not see but could nevertheless reach: prayers to him were answered and services rendered in his name were rewarded here on earth, not in heaven.

  After his success in Europe, for which he’d been abundantly blessed, Felix had been dispatched to the belly of the beast: America. It was the next phase, the natural outcome of Zahir’s ambitions: a bigger market for their goods and a bigger target for their attacks. There were three main sources for the world’s opium trade. Product from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle was called China White, and that was what had traditionally dominated the big cities of the northeastern United States. The sticky, dark stuff that came up from Mexico into California and the Southwest was called black tar, and, increasingly, white heroin from Latin America was flooding the United States as well. Heroin from Felix’s part of the world was called Persian, and it accounted for merely 4 percent of the US market. It was considered a rare treat and would fetch a high price. Of course, the actual difference was in the mind of the consumer: a lover of fine wine or cigars might covet a certain bottle or band, but the need for alcohol or nicotine will be fed just as well by rotgut booze and hand-rolled shag. And nothing beats addiction to insure a stable market. Synthetic opiates like Oxy arrive on the scene, trendier drugs like MDMA come and go, but opium had been beguiling, bedeviling, and enriching humanity for millennia. Dope was forever. And Persian was king.

  Felix’s mission was to work with Zahir’s New York contact, who had been studying the lay of the land and finding likely buyers and possible threats from the law and from the underworld. He would also be shepherding through this first shipment, sent via a new connection to New York. If this first test shipment went well, if the goods arrived safely and the money flowed back securely, then they would open the pipeline—larger loads of stolen heroin, regular shipments, reliable distribution, and more money all around. And if they eventually sent something else through that same pipeline, like a dirty bomb or a suitcase nuke, then so be it. True, Felix loved New York, but he’d get over it. He’d heard that Los Angeles was even better these days.

  17

  Later, as they were leaving Maria’s building, Yelena said, “I do not think I like that woman.”

  “No,” Joe said. “But I like how she cooks pork.”

  Yelena shrugged. Fair enough. She’d had seconds herself. “And you thought of a way to get the diamonds for her dope?”

  Joe nodded as they walked down the block. “I think so. I’m going to need you to go shopping tomorrow. And I have to talk to Juno.” He glanced at Gio’s Rolex. “But right now I’m late to meet Gio and give him back his wedding ring and watch.” At the corner of Broadway he hailed a cab.

  *

  Gio arranged to meet Joe at Old Shenanigan’s, one of the huge Irish pubs that dominated the area north of Penn Station, the onetime stomping ground of the Westies. Just as the Deuce, once a gauntlet of old-fashioned vice—sex, drugs, booze, horror, and kung fu movies—had become the new Times Square’s giant tourist trap, each version a different man’s vision of hell, so Hell’s Kitchen itself now housed these theme-park versions of the old-time buckets of blood: vast pubs full of Irish flags, waitresses in green aprons, and Guinness on tap, but without the soul or the menace. Except for Pat—he was the soul and the menace, and like the ghost of the Westies, he was still hanging around.

  Not that he ever hung out in this place. He merely owned it, in the sense that he controlled it and pocketed much of the proceeds; his name appeared on no document. Earlier, Gio had texted a number that he knew one of Pat’s underlings checked, and the response had invited him here for a beer. Now, entering the pub, the roar of happy hour blasted him as hard as the air-conditioning, and he weaved through the crowd, mostly office workers in ties and shirtsleeves, skirts and blouses, or tourists in cargo shorts and jeans. He bought a Harp Lager and made his way upstairs where there was table service, families eating burgers or fish and chips, and flat screens showing silent sports. He continued through another door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and up another flight of stairs, clean but minus the polished wood banister and green wallpaper. The din was now a faint throb in the air. He pushed through a door into a crowded storeroom with cleaning products and toilet paper everywhere and cases of liquor stacked high, then up one more flight of stairs. These were dirty and dusty, with cracked concrete and discarded newspapers underfoot. At the top, he reached a door marked DO NOT ENTER—ALARM WILL SOUND. He entered. No alarm sounded. This was raw space, lit with bare bulbs and the street glow from uncovered windows. The floor was concrete, the walls exposed studs and unpainted drywall. Wiring and ducts ran under the ceiling. In the back two doors were marked LADIES and GENTS. He opened the GENTS. It was a large restroom, even larger without the appliances: just a tiled box, clean but cold, with a mirror across one wall, pipes where the sinks and urinals would go, and a row of toilets without stalls. On a corner toilet, under a bare bulb, sat Patty White, holding a pint glass of Guinness stout.

  “Gio, my friend, how can I help you?”

  Gio put out his hand and they shook. “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  Pat smiled. “It’s always a pleasure to drink with an old friend. I’m just sorry it has to be in such ignoble surroundings.”

  “Seems nice and cool in here. And private.”

  “Indeed. And hard to hide a bug in. Have a seat. No need to drop your trousers.” He waved his drink. “Though at my age drinking my stout like this might actually be more convenient.”

  Gio considered the toilet. It was unused, not even installed yet, so it was clean, but still there was no lid, just the institutional-style seat over the rim, and he was wearing a light gray summer-weight suit that would stain easily. He draped his hanky over it and sat, holding up his beer. “To healthy plumbing, at any age.” They clinked glasses and drank.

  “I wanted to ask you about Uder.” Uder was the smuggler who had recently been busted. Gio and Patty had arranged for a truckload of expensive electronics gear to be hijacked, an inside job through the union he controlled, then shipped to his associates in Naples. Patty had provided the muscle for the job and connected Gio’s Naples people to the buyer, Uder, a German from the old East Berlin whom he knew from IRA days. The deal had gone through, and the money had come home, but shortly thereafter, Interpol had grabbed up Uder. Too bad for Uder. Gio hadn’t given it much thought till now. It had never occurred to him that the information leading to his arrest might be from Gio’s side.

  “Ah, poor Uder,” Patty said. “Last I heard he is awaiting trial. Sitting in a room much like this only smaller and with bars on it.”

  “I’m wondering if you know how he got pinched. If someone talked. And if so, who?”

  Patty shook his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest. After all, Europe’s an ocean away, even in our global age. No American law enforcement was involved. Nor does he know anything that could hurt you or me.” He patted Gio’s leg. “Of that I assure you.”

  “That’s good to know. But I’ve been hearing talk about myself from my sources in law enforcement. Just chatter but it seems to be from out of town. And now with this Maria thing. I know you have a lot of friends in the government, especially Feds.” He shrugged. “You might ask around.”

  “I will make some discreet inquiries.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Gio said. “It may be nothing. Just being cautious.”

  “By all means. We a
ll know pigs and rats are a hazard to your health.” He held up his glass, as though for attention: “But so is paranoia, my friend.”

  Gio clinked glasses again: “Says the wise man sitting on the toilet.”

  Pat laughed, and they finished their beers.

  *

  When Gio got back downstairs, after stopping by a real men’s room to check that his pants were clean (they were), Joe was waiting at the bar with a barely touched club soda and lime.

  “Thanks for coming,” Gio told him as they shook hands. “And waiting.” He put his empty on the bar. Joe handed him his watch and ring and he slipped them both on. “Great. I felt naked without these.” He glanced around at the crowd, which was at maximum. It was hard to imagine anyone eavesdropping in this din but still: “I also want to talk to you about something outside. But I can wait till you finish your drink.”

  Joe took another sip of his club soda. “Finished,” he said. They went out and started walking across town. It was night now and the mood of the crowd on the street was looser, less stressed, the energy still high but with more expectation, people going out somewhere, not people coming from work. The air was warm and full of promise, good or bad.

  “I suspect there’s a rat in my house,” Gio said. Joe said nothing. He just waited for his old friend to continue. Gio went on, explaining everything that Fusco had said, the business with Uder and the conversation with Pat.

  “Do you trust Pat?” Joe asked.

  “I trust you,” Gio said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Gio shrugged. “Do some spy shit.”

  Joe laughed. They stood at the avenue, waiting for the light. Traffic rolled by. “If we don’t know who’s talking or who they’re talking to, it’s hard to get started. I can’t just put on a tuxedo like James Bond and show up at the bad guy’s roulette game.”

  “I was picturing you in more like a SEAL diving outfit, but yeah I know what you mean.”