And Raul wanted more, too. It was true that he had never been inside a townhouse before, but he had never been inside a skyscraper before, either. And when he did that, he found out he could take not only Goldman’s laptop but three others without being known. He’d never done any shit like this before or known people who got shit like this done. What he’d already accomplished could be made into a video game. It was Mission Impossible. He could think it through. He knew exactly what to do. Raul was ready to handle Eagleton.
But Yakoob could be vague. Beyond the basic facts of date, place, and face, the only instructions he gave Raul was to do this one like a pool game. “With every shot you take, you line up the next two options or you play a safety. There can never be an angle that surprises you. Relax. Think of Sidarra’s game: the soft touch always beats the bang. You got a lot of bang in you. Just get the man’s shit.”
Being in the thick of whatever he was in was more than a thrill for Raul. It was the education he never had. He went to school on Eagleton. He figured he’d be caught if he tried to get into the Board of Ed building, but a townhouse was a little different. He learned that Eagleton liked Scotch and he knew where Eagleton kept it. He knew when he had it, and he knew that Eagleton’s wife drank something else. He observed that whenever Eagleton himself was home, he was never far from his own briefcase or his laptop. Raul learned that schools chancellors and their wives would rather not shop for groceries themselves. They had it delivered from an online supermarket that only operated in Manhattan. Raul knew that he was too wide to fit under a steel fence above the promenade, so he lost twelve pounds. And, most of all, Raul knew Manny, another dealer.
If Raul had been a small-time dealer of good cheeba, Manny was a chemist with a business plan. Manny was an ex-junkie from the same block, and he had been instrumental in Raul’s marriage to angel dust several years before. For a junkie, Manny was lucky. Crack didn’t work for him; only heroin did. He could sell crack and do heroin at the same time. Some people’s bodies have that gift. The longer he stayed in the game, opportunities for other productive chemistry lessons came his way. Fate kept him out of jail and his flesh bullet-free. So he was around for new drugs, designer cocktails, homemade Ecstasy, things he could make as a hobby. For a dealer, he was extremely lucky, gaining notoriety for cutting-edge shit without the usual stickups and shoot-outs. Friends came to Manny for knowledge, pills, and new highs. Raul came to his heavily fortified apartment on East 112th Street in Spanish Harlem for something slow, potent, and obscure.
“The money is good, yo,” Manny said one evening in late June. He was cooking on a laboratory stove. He hunched his long, bony frame shirtless over a flame. “Please, Raul. Don’t touch shit, okay?”
Raul drew still again and leaned against a wall. “I already told you it’d be a grip. Don’t ever doubt that shit, motherfucker. My word is bond. But you gotta show me exactly how or you might have a hard time spending that cash.”
Manny understood. “It’s all in the amounts. It’s basic fucking biology, man. Just be cool. I’ll show you.”
MICHAEL HAD NOT GIVEN UP despite the doubts he hoped Raquel would pass on to her mother about their relationship. He sensed something not just distant but stronger in Sidarra’s personality. She still had most of her same old insecurities, but as a man with a little more time in the world, he figured she was growing up again. She was accepting those things about herself and going on. To keep her from going without him, he bought her clothes she wouldn’t wear. He tried to feed her beauty better than she was learning to do herself. He rubbed her back without request. He reminded her of their old rituals, like reading Sunday papers over Sunday brunch. He offered to take them to dinner if ever she’d go. And hardest of all, he never doubted her investment interests anymore. The success was too obvious. But he tripped up over the brownstone thing.
“Six hundred thousand dollars?” he almost screamed the night she told him Mr. Simms’s asking price. “Excuse me. Is he fucking crazy?”
“Michael, please lower your damn voice. You’ll wake the baby.”
Michael began to pace frantically around the kitchen in his high black socks, boxers, and white undershirt. “That’s mind-boggling. That’s mind-boggling, Sid. That’s what he really thinks he can get?”
“He showed me comparable sales figures,” she said from behind a cup of tea.
“Have white people lost their damn minds? Who the hell would pay that kind of money for this hulk of deferred maintenance in Harlem? Harlem! Don’t these yuppie bastards know what Harlem is? What, are they knifeproof? Bulletproof?” He pretended to be a yuppie walking down the street. “‘Don’t mind me, junkie, sir. I’ll just step over you on my way up to my million-dollar personal tenement. And don’t waste your bullets shooting me in the back, because, funny thing is, those things just don’t affect my kind.’ Geez. And these are the same people who watch you count out their change in the token line like you must be the dumb-ass who’s sure to short them a nickel. I don’t get it, Sid. This uptown madness is gonna end in about ten minutes.”
“Look, I don’t know why it’s happening either, but it’s been going on for a lot longer than ten minutes, Michael.” Sidarra waved off Michael’s exaggerations. “You see those nice people on the street who still smile and wear old clothes and stand at the checkout line and pay with pennies at the bottom of their purses? They used to be all over New York. On the bus. At the park. Where do you think they live? They live in rent-stabilized apartments, Michael. Well, guess what? They’re not making any more rent-stabilized apartments. All those people have to go. If you want to stay in this place, you better get rich and you better own, Michael, or they’re gonna drive you out. That’s just how it is now.”
“But, Sid, you know Harlem. This place ain’t no Broadway musical. Motherfuckers actually live and die here. It couldn’t be worth that kind of money even if you had it.”
“But it’s home. Why should you be the only person in this room who appreciates owning the home he loves?”
“Maybe ’cause I do actually love it and you really don’t. Maybe ’cause it’s the Bronx, baby! Do you know what six hundred thousand dollars would buy you in the Bronx? Any idea? The whole damn borough only costs about two and a half million.”
Sidarra had had enough and bit her lip in exasperation. “What are you talking about, man? Do you know what it means to finally own my own home? Can you imagine what it means to have my daughter see me do that for us? I think I can do this. I can do this. Me. A brownstone. Do you know a brownstone is all my daddy ever hoped to get us—a brownstone and a Mercedes-Benz? And he never got either.” She paused and looked out the window with her hand on her hip, then back at him. “So just what are you saying, Michael? Because I don’t want to keep running around this with you if you can’t be supportive at all.”
He held a beer can to his thick belly and sighed at her. “I want to be supportive, darling. You know I do.” He scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s time. Maybe we could—”
“Could what, Michael?” she baited him to finally say it. For years he couldn’t even talk about marriage and she knew he wouldn’t now.
“I don’t know,” he said, falling back against the kitchen countertop. “What do I know? Apparently you’re the one got all the dividends coming. I just think you should at least consider the Bronx.”
“The Bronx, no thonx,” she said calmly, just as her daddy would have said.
RAUL SAT ALONE ON A BENCH at the end of the promenade one perfect night in June. The air was warm and still crisp. For all the clarity of the sky that glowed with the light of a million Manhattan office windows, nobody walked by to disturb him. Raul would probably enjoy few chances ever to take in the peace of that view again. In fact, he would get exactly three, and this was the first.
He squeezed under the fence bars on a Wednesday evening while Eagleton was still out and the house was empty of workers, guests or Mrs. Eagleton. Raul carefully reached
the Scotch carafe in the bar and left a few drops of the future in it. Somehow Eagleton would have to be involuntarily separated from his work and induced to forget about it. Raul was back on the bench in time to see houselights come on in the windows. That was the night of the IPO, June 6. The Eagletons got in from celebrating around 11 P.M.
On the second night, Raul crawled under security gates with Nestlé Crunch bars in his stomach. He had thought hard about the skyline across the river, distracting himself with minor visions of honor and expertise. When his moment came again, he slipped back inside the residence and smeared Manny’s mix over the fresh steaks that had arrived earlier by truck. Mrs. Eagleton, he knew, was a vegetarian. That was a Friday. The mix worked slowly through the system. It was hardly perceptible until the toxins had accumulated, but once they reached a certain point, the process would be fast. It needed a foothold in the lymph nodes. Multiplication throughout the bloodstream with just two doses. Then a third and final administration to hasten a deep sleep before the body could panic and seek help. That he took care of on the following Wednesday, again with a belly full of chocolate. By that time he’d grown bold. That time, Raul was still sitting in the house when the potion went down. He had found a dark place to wait and listen. He was a witness to Eagleton’s last Scotch of the night. One false move or an errant sound and the Glock would have changed the plan instantly.
While Yakoob and his wife were in an Ocho Rios bungalow feverishly enjoying the fruits of his investment acumen while trying to make a baby, Raul was busy taking his words to heart. He remembered that Eagleton was Sidarra’s boss and that Yakoob had called him the problem. Maybe he didn’t need to wake from this sleep after all. Mrs. Eagleton had left on Thursday for a weekend trip home to see family in Minnesota. There was only the question of timing and Eagleton’s peculiar insides. The chancellor had approximately twenty-two hours in which to die. His heart would simply give out. But Raul had to know; it would determine when and how he’d return the laptop and briefcase to the house. His own heart barely beat from his hiding place in the long curtains of the back parlor. The hundred-and-fifty-year-old floorboards described exactly where Eagleton was in the grand front parlor. Raul tried to imagine the movements he heard. Eventually he heard stumbling. Eagleton had fallen against something. Something had fallen to the floor and shattered. Something else sounded like a groan, but he couldn’t be sure. Then Raul heard the unmistakable sound of cell phone buttons being pressed.
“Yes, I’m not sure, but I, uh, I’m not feeling myself. I have a bit of numbness—”
With a soft touch, Raul appeared and dropped the phone to the floor for him. He stayed behind Eagleton’s torso and wrapped it in his thick arms. An elbow to the windpipe, a firm palm compressed the chest. That’s all the help the system needed to close down. From the little speaker on the floor, a dispatcher was asking questions. Beside it, Jack Eagleton could no longer answer.
“SEE, DARLIN’, this is what I’m talking about,” Michael said from one side of his dining room table. He had made the omelets that morning along with French toast, a bowl of strawberries, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and imported Sumatra coffee out of his new coffeemaker. “Look at these Bronx listings. It’s like another world. Back in the days before Manhattan lost its mind.”
He and Sidarra had met for brunch at last that Sunday, and they pored over the newspaper she read now (but he quietly hated most), the New York Times. Michael handed her the real estate section and she pretended to study the classifieds.
“It’s definitely another world,” she said. She took a few more bites and smiled as if the food was better than it was. Michael was always very proud of his eggs. They weren’t bad once you got past all the salt. He was busy reading the front page. “Michael, I don’t think you should count on us moving to the Bronx. My commute to work, Raquel losing her friends, Aunt Chickie being in Harlem and all. Either buying the brownstone is gonna have to work or we’re gonna have to find something else close by. That’s what I’m thinking now.”
He listened quietly, averting his eyes occasionally as she spoke. When she was done, he said okay and resigned himself to the newsprint again. “Oh, damn,” he said all of a sudden. “Ain’t that some shit. Sidarra, look at this.”
“What?”
“Your boss, girl. Your boss is dead.”
“Clay?”
“No, your boss boss. The chancellor. Look here. Eagleton. The man died yesterday of a heart attack, they think.”
“You had better be joking, Michael.” Sidarra grabbed the paper from him and read a few paragraphs of the article. She rushed her hand to her mouth as her eyes absorbed the words. “My God!” she gasped. “How do you like that?” she whispered.
“Fifty-two. What a shame,” said Michael. “That’s young for a white man. Did you know this guy, work with him?”
Sidarra could barely think beyond her sense of shock and just shrugged. “Not really. I mean, everybody up there is near him, you know, but not like contact. I was introduced to him when he came on. He looked through me on a few occasions after that. I didn’t know him.”
They read together for a couple of minutes, turning to the page the story continued on without saying a word. “Guy was the real deal,” Michael said. “Raised in San Francisco. Yale-, Oxford-educated. Very qualified guy. Loss for the kids. You, uh,” Michael turned to Sidarra, “you okay?”
She nodded, still fixed on one particular paragraph.
“This gonna be a problem for you?”
Sidarra had been reading the part about Eagleton’s wife, her trip to the emergency room, the end, when she realized Michael had been talking to her. “No. No. They come, they go. It can’t probably get much worse for me. We’ll see. But, uh, his wife, Michael. I’m thinking about the man’s wife. She came home yesterday and found him on the floor. Imagine that. Her man. Just like that, gone.”
13
THE MAN IN THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT wanted eight, but was willing to take five thousand dollars and three months to move out. The boiler was not in bad condition, but the electrical system was underpowered, and many wires had been gnawed into by basement rats. All the plumbing was the original copper. The huge mantel in the parlor apartment where Mrs. Thomas had lived was mahogany under several coats of white, then green, then a fading peach layer of paint. The reconfiguration of each floor into one unit would not be as hard to do, given the convenient position of support beams. And the whole thing leaned east about eight or nine degrees. Sidarra learned all this about the brownstone before she bought it from Mr. Simms, who is still slapping himself. When he purchased the place for $45,000 in 1978, he never expected to sell it one day for $525,000. It was easy to come down off his price. Sidarra paid cash. Mr. Simms danced back to the Bronx. She liquidated most of her Cicero Club gains from the offshore shell company to do it, hundreds of shares in sixteen carefully researched companies. The sell-off made Sidarra the crew’s junior shareholder. Yet it came right back. Within weeks of the public offering, they had made nine times their investment in Solutions, Inc.
And there would be more money soon.
“How do you know?” she asked Griff.
“I thought you would know,” he said over coffee. They sat beside each other in the booth and dropped into hushed tones. “The plan was to get in on the IPO, sure. But we were only gonna hold a few weeks or so, then dump most of it. Koob placed a bet online about a Solutions director.” She looked quizzically at him. “You can do that,” Griff added, turning to meet her eyes only briefly. “Koob told you.”
“Koob never told me that.”
“He did. You weren’t listening. Or you were high already. This is why I think we need a rule against smoking cheeba until after persuasion.” He chuckled and tried to hide his face in a sip of coffee, but Sidarra just waited, a little impatiently, for Griff to come back to the point. “This web site has some nefarious shit you can wager on. It’s an online international mayhem casino. You can bet on certain untimely even
ts.”
“Who the hell knows about shit like that?” she asked incredulously.
“Belinda. My wife,” he said. Sidarra rolled her eyes. “Koob says it’s set up by Russians. The risk is ridiculous, Sid, but the payouts are absurd. They list the directors of every Fortune 500 company, heads of state, national monuments, climactic events, terrorism, plane crashes. If anything happens, you can hit. When Eagleton died suddenly, we hit.”
“When did you place the bet? How could you have known he would have a massive heart attack?”
“We didn’t know,” Griff answered, his expression unchanged. “We placed it a while ago, after we decided to get in on the IPO. We placed it on all the top executives of Fortune 500 companies we had a piece of, a thousand dollars in the event any one of a list of directors over the age of fifty died in a month that began with the letter J. Eagleton died in June and paid ten to one. Baby, there was a lot of money at stake with the angel round. We needed insurance.”
She squeezed his hand in disbelief, looked away, and choked back a smile to keep it from growing too wide. For just a moment something in Griff’s eyes looked false, different; like the news, it threw her off-balance. “I wish I’d known. It’s definitely a nice surprise.” She paused and shook her head. “But let’s get something straight, Griff: I don’t ever want to be treated like lady luck by you guys. My brothers used to do that and their luck ran out pretty fast. I want to know about everything before it happens. I want to decide everything before it happens.” She looked deeply into Griff’s hazel eyes and held his gaze. The old sincerity had returned; he seemed to get it. “Now, I’ve been thinking about moving into trusts more. I might do that. What do you think?” she asked.
The Importance of Being Dangerous Page 12
