Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  It had all been for nothing, and now it wasn’t so much shame as envy I felt from him. Even after I got out of jail, we barely spoke.

  The worst thing was that I couldn’t avoid the wider mafia. Within the “LCN community,” and among its many hangers-on, I had achieved the worst kind of celebrity: the kind where people you don’t know recognize you instantly as a cold-blooded killer, and love you for it. Those lowlifes had paid for my defense, and they were touchy, vain, insecure, and dangerous. I could turn down some of their invitations, but not all of them. There was a limit to how hard I could snub them.

  At least the mob guys didn’t want me to go back to killing people. They understood that the myth that I was now bulletproof because the government would be too embarrassed to ever charge me with anything again was worth a lot more to them untested.* But fuck those assholes wanted me around. It was during that time that I met Eddy “Consol” Squillante. Among many, many others.

  “Assholes” really doesn’t do them justice, by the way. Those fuckheads were hideous. Proudly ignorant, personally repellent, absolutely convinced that their willingness to hire someone to beat money out of someone who worked for a living constituted some kind of genius and an adherence to a proud tradition. Though whenever I asked one of them about that tradition—the one thing I was interested in hearing about from those slimehags—they’d usually clam right up. I never knew whether this was because of the oath they’d taken or because they just didn’t know anything. Though I never stopped asking, because, at the least, getting those fuckers to shut up was its own kind of victory.

  Skinflick invited me to a couple of parties at the apartment he’d moved into on the Upper East Side. If I went I’d show up when I thought it would be the most crowded, seek him out to shake his hand, and leave. He’d say something like, “I miss you, dude,” and I’d say, “Me too,” and in a way it would be true. I’d miss something, and whatever it was, it was definitely gone.

  In fact, if I’d only had more faith in that—in how dead things had become—I might have been able to save all of us.

  It was April 9, 2001. I was home, but Skinflick called me on my cell phone. It was night. I was waiting for Magdalena to get back from playing an anniversary party. I had recently bought her a car.

  Skinflick called me and said, “Dude, fuck, I am in huge huge trouble. I am fucked. I need your help. Can I come pick you up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Is it going to get me arrested?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s not illegal. It’s a lot fucking worse than that.”

  And because I hadn’t finalized my break with him, I told him, “Fine. Pick me up.”

  The whole way out to Coney, Skinflick chewed his nails and took hits of cocaine out of an Altoids tin by licking his fingertip, dunking it, sniffing off the powder, then rubbing the rest around his gums like he was brushing his teeth.

  “I can’t tell you. I need to show you,” he kept saying.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Please, dude. Please. Just be cool. You’ll understand.”

  I doubted that. I felt like Skinflick and I were having the conversation I’d had with Sam Freed the night before the Feds dropped the charges. Only I knew that this time the surprise was not going to be anything good.

  “Want some coke?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  By then I’d stopped doing drugs. I’d done a fair amount in jail, to fight the boredom, but compared to a six-mile run with Magdalena, let alone fucking her chilled sweaty body afterwards, that shit just didn’t hold up. The amount Skinflick had on him, though, and the amount he snorted as he drove, were impressive and frightening.

  He drove us to Coney, and parked in the same place we had almost two years earlier. Then we took the same underworld walk beneath the pier, though this time he had a larger Maglite.

  We went through the fence gap and straight to the shark tank building. It looked smaller than I’d remembered it. The door was already unlocked.

  I figured by then that Skinflick had lied to me about the illegal part, and that he’d killed someone and needed my help hiding the body. He pulled the door closed with a bang, and led the way up the curving metal stairs.

  He turned his flashlight off as we ducked into the tank room itself, and for a moment all I could see was the gray glow of the skylights and, down below, their reflection in the black water.

  Then I heard the noise—a high-pitched “Mmmmmmmm!”

  The most accurate way to reproduce it would be to put gaffer’s tape over your mouth then try to scream through it. Since gaffer’s tape was what was over Magdalena’s mouth.

  I recognized the sound of her instantly. The adrenaline jacked my pupil size. Suddenly I could see.

  There were half a dozen mob assholes, more or less, around the balcony. It’s hard to count in those situations. I recognized a couple of them. All of them were armed.

  The rope across the missing section of banister had been removed, and the ramp was unfolded out over the water. Magdalena and her brother Rovo, who was hulking behind her, were standing near the top of the ramp. Their arms, legs, and mouths were taped—sloppily, like the webs spiders weave when you test toxic drugs on them. There was an asshole with a gun just behind them.

  An impulse hit me. Kill. All around the room, knees, eyes, and throats lit up like targets in a shooting gallery.

  But I didn’t target Skinflick. I could have—I could have lashed out backwards with my heel, and buried it so far past his sternum that I’d crush his heart. But somehow I didn’t yet believe he could be part of this. He’d known about it, yes. But maybe he’d been forced to bring me here. Or something. So I spared him when I started killing.

  The creep to my left wasn’t so lucky. He had a Glock pointed at me. I moved in from the outside of it, visualizing the front of his shoulder blade through his chest and then feeling my shoulder crush toward it through his collarbone and lung. I clawed his throat out backhand as I took his gun. With my throat hand I grabbed Skinflick’s flashlight and used it to blind two more of those fucks. Then I shot them through the chest.

  But Skinflick, for once, was fast. Because this time all he had to do was flinch backwards through the doorway, and flinching was what he was expert at. From the safety of the arch he yelled “Shoot!”

  I shot two more before they could start. Then the creep behind Magdalena and Rovo shoved them off the edge of the ramp, and they started dropping toward the water. I shot that creep through the forehead, and vaulted the railing.

  I couldn’t fall fast enough. I could see that Magdalena and Rovo, in addition to being taped up, were taped together. Just a couple of strands, but enough to hold. I was moving toward the water so slowly I wanted to scream. I shot another thug as his stomach came into view below the banister, just for something to do.

  Someone else started shooting at me. I saw a muzzle-flash blossom slowly from the balcony, though by then I couldn’t hear.

  Then I finally hit the water, and things began to happen.

  Water’s always shocking, but I was shocked already, and the water felt as thin as air as I moved through it toward where I thought the Magdalena-Rovo bundle was. My knee hit something slimy that at first gave way like a leather bag filled with water, then sprang into life and lashed back at me.

  A lucky grab got me Magdalena’s hair. Something slapped me on the neck. I got hold of some gaffer’s tape and thrashed for the surface. Breathed air that turned out to be water, then spasmed and finally got my head out. I kept kicking things with my legs. At one point I kicked something that felt like a giant slimy rock, so hard I almost sprained my ankle.

  I didn’t have time to think about it, though. I couldn’t find Rovo’s head. Finally I got smart and rotated him separately from Magdalena, and they both gasped in horribly through their nostrils.

  I sank again, pushing them upwards. Something nosed into my stomach, hard. I needed support. I w
ondered if there was a shallow end, and if so how to find it.

  When I came up for air again, someone on the balcony was shooting. It didn’t seem to matter all that much. I’d long since dropped the gun and the flashlight. What I needed was some way to keep us above water.

  Something slammed me in the back and took us all toward one of the walls. I kicked us into the space where two of the hexagonal tank’s walls came together, and tried to use the friction of the glass to lodge Magdalena and Rovo in place with their heads above water. I kicked and thrashed to keep the sharks away. The second it seemed to be working I reached up and tore the tape off Magdalena and Rovo’s mouths.

  Magdalena started choking at once. Rovo I had to thump on the chest. Every time I stopped kicking as hard as I could, something sideswiped my legs. Rovo and Magdalena starting wheezing, then hyperventilating. “Breathe!” I shouted.

  The waves began to subside, though the butting from below kept up. I wasn’t sure why the sharks hadn’t attacked yet, but from the way they became more aggressive when my attention lapsed, it seemed clear they were testing me out.

  And maybe the bullets had helped. I could hear someone moaning on the walkway above us.

  After a long while Skinflick called out from somewhere else. “Pietro?”

  I debated whether to respond. I was pretty sure he couldn’t see us. I couldn’t see him, in any case, just dim, grated light through the walkway directly overhead, and a small part of one skylight if I looked back over my shoulder. So Skinflick might not know whether we were still alive, and he might be trying to locate us by sound. I was thrashing quite a bit, but that could have been sharks.

  I did know this, though:

  I’d been stupid not to kill him up above. He, and no one else, had done this.

  But he was also our only way out. As repugnant and hopeless as I knew it would be, I had no choice but to try to talk him out of it.

  “Skinflick!” I said. My voice felt harsh and weak.

  “How you feeling?” he said. His voice echoed around. At least it seemed impossible to pinpoint anything that way.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

  “Killing you.”

  “Why?”

  “My dad found out it was you that killed Kurt Limme.”

  “That’s bullshit! Your dad killed Kurt Limme. Or paid some Russian to do it.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Why would I do it? What did I give a fuck? Get us out of here!”

  “It’s a bit too late for that,” he said.

  “For what? You know I’m telling you the truth!”

  “Don’t think you’d know truth if it bit you on the ass, pal. Which I believe it is about to do.”

  “Skinflick!” I shouted.

  He was silent for several moments. Then he said, “You know why my dad hired the Virzis to kill your grandparents?”

  “What?” I said.

  “You heard me. You know why?”

  “No! And I don’t care!”

  I didn’t, actually. I didn’t know whether it was true, I didn’t know what it meant if it was, and I didn’t want to hear Skinflick go on about it.

  “It was a favor to some Russian Jews,” he said. “Your grandparents weren’t actually the Brnwas. They were Poles. They worked at Auschwitz as teenagers.”

  His voice intermittently cut out as the water got above my ears. I was pushing against both glass walls at once, trying to keep Magdalena and Rovo lodged into the corner. But they kept slipping down the front of my body.

  “The real Brnwas died there,” Skinflick went on. “And your grandparents took their identities to get out of the country after the war. But they met a Russian guy in Israel who recognized them, and who had known the real Brnwas. A friend of his called my dad.”

  I couldn’t help taking part of this in. It had the feeling of something that would require figuring out, and possibly feeling bad about.

  If, say, I was alive in a week.

  Right now I needed Skinflick to shut up and help us.

  “So what?” I screamed.

  “So you don’t know shit.”

  “Fine!” I said. “I forgive you! I forgive your dad! I forgive my fucking grandparents! Get us out of here!”

  Skinflick didn’t answer. Then he said, “I don’t know, dude. You killed all my guys.”

  “That’s a good thing,” I said. “No one knows about this. Come on!” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “You want me to help you kill someone else, I will!”

  “Yeah. Like last time?” he said. “I think I’ll take what’s on the table, thanks. And that’s you. Literally.”

  “The Farm wasn’t my fault. You know that!”

  I started to panic. My legs and arms were burning. Living things were sliming along my ankles. And I was having no luck whatsoever pulling the tape off Magdalena’s and her brother’s bodies. I could only stare into their terrified eyes, and feel their hot breath on my face.

  “Whatever, pal,” Skinflick said. “Or maybe I should say ‘chum.’ As in ‘feeding time.’”

  The guy dying over us dropped his gun into the water. It hit about three feet away, but there was nothing I could do about it. Skinflick fired a couple of shots into the water randomly when he heard the sound.

  “Now I’ve got to get these fucking bodies out of here,” he said, when the echo died down. “You know, I thought about bringing some meat in case the fish weren’t biting. I guess that’s not going to be necessary.”

  I figured that meant he was planning to throw one of the bodies into the water, and wondered if that might help us: a chunk of food the sharks could compare to us, and use to decide we weren’t food.

  Then I felt something on my face, and tasted copper. I looked up, and a big drop hit my eye. It stung. It was warm.

  “At least let Magdalena and her brother out of here!” I yelled at Skinflick. “They didn’t do anything to you!”

  “Casualties of war, chum. Sorry.”

  Two seconds later the sharks began to strike.

  The sharks had a choice of me or Rovo, because as soon as I realized what was happening I covered most of Magdalena’s body with my own.

  Rovo was throwing a lot fewer elbows than I was. The surface of the water bucked and splintered as they attacked him.

  People sometimes say that all sharks do is swim and kill, but that gives them too much credit. They use the same muscles, along their sides, for both. They clamp their jaws shut on something, then just whip side to side until a mouthful of it tears free. Then, if they feel they have the luxury, they back off until their target bleeds to death.

  The sharks at Coney did not have that luxury, and they knew it. There were too many of them. That tank was an obscenely concentrated slice of organic hell, packed with animals that in the wild would swim hundreds of miles a day, and stay the fuck away from each other. Here, if they bit and backed off, there wouldn’t be anything left. So the ones that struck Rovo pulled him off the wall toward the center of the tank, and dragged Magdalena and me with him.

  It felt like we were being flushed down a drain. Underwater, with my legs around Magdalena, I found the tape around her arms and ripped it with my teeth. It tore out my lower left canine tooth and the one just behind it, but it got her free.

  At the surface, though, she flailed away from me toward Rovo, who was being turned and yanked from every direction, and was still screaming blood in the light from above. I grabbed the tape around Magdalena’s legs and pulled her back into the darkness just as Skinflick started firing again.

  I think that’s what actually killed Rovo. I fucking well hope so.

  I got Magdalena back to one of the corners and pressed a hand over her mouth. I think she could see over my shoulder. She didn’t have to. The water was alive, and you could feel the tearing and the snapping of the sharks fighting over her brother’s body.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that. I was holding us both against the walls,
kicking to keep us afloat and also freaking out every time I felt or imagined I felt something brush against my feet or legs. Which was constantly.

  What felt like a couple of hours went by. Over time the skirmishes got less violent and less frequent, until they ceased to break the surface of the water. God knows what pieces of Rovo were still worth fighting over. Things turned relatively quiet.

  Then there was a voice up above. “Mr. Locano—Jesus fuck.”

  Somebody else spoke: “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah,” Skinflick said. “Just clean it up, would you?”

  Someone started to drag bodies. It took a long time. The toes of the mob assholes’ shoes made xylophone noises on the metal grating of the balcony.

  Eventually they finished. Skinflick shone a flashlight around, but I kept us mostly underwater.

  “Pietro?” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Nice knowing you, pal,” he said.

  He went and retracted the ramp before he left.

  When I look back on it, half the time I ever spent with Magdalena seems to be that night.

  We moved with infinite slowness around the perimeter. I kept her as high as I could against the glass, and she reached up into the darkness, searching for some low-lying strut or faucet or anything else we could use to pull ourselves out. I also searched with my feet for the rock I’d hit earlier. Neither one of us had any luck. The grating, five whole feet off the water, might as well have been a mile away.

  In the corners you could sort of push outward against both panes of glass, even though the angle was wide, and hold yourself up. If you pushed too hard, you pushed yourself backwards off the wall. If you didn’t push hard enough, you sank. My arms and neck were in agony.

  And of course there were other, more trivial problems. The salt that made us buoyant enough to keep our heads above the surface was harsh in our eyes and mouths. The water itself was about eighty degrees, which feels warm at first but is easily cold enough to kill you if you’re in it long enough.

  When it came to saving Magdalena, though, I felt indestructible, and immune to fatigue. I came up with a technique. I put Magdalena’s legs over my shoulders with her facing me so that I could keep as much of her as possible out of the water. I did it for hours, I think. Eventually we took her clothes off, since she was warmer without them. And eventually after that she let me lick her, although she never stopped crying, even while she came.