The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

“Did you eat yet?”

  I didn’t respond.

  She went back toward the steel door, keys and clipboard in her hands. Her eyes were on her clipboard, not mine. My eyes were on her as she slowly unlocked the steel door.

  This was my moment.

  I didn’t know what was beyond the area outside my door. Guards? Guns? Dogs? Gates? But it didn’t matter. This was my chance.

  The girl, her eyes on her clipboard, didn’t notice as I slowly moved beyond the yellow line marking the safety zone before the door. But then, as if she had eyes on the back of her head, she turned and saw me, and she bolted the door again.

  “Hey!” she said. “Step behind the yellow line!”

  I stood behind the yellow line, and the girl, God bless her, did the sweetest, dumbest, and most wonderful thing, she turned the key to the metal door and started to open it again. I sprang. Screams and “Stop him! Stop him!” But it was too late. I pushed past her, trying my best not to knock her over.

  “Stop him!” she yelled, feebly lifting her hands before her, only to drop them and jump back as I roared like a wounded animal, “NO!”

  I ran down a long, well-lit but empty hall, with a thousand elevator banks leading God knows where. I pressed every button, then hid around a corner and waited. When I heard a ding, I jumped blind and hopeful into an empty car going down.

  I went and slouched at the back of the car.

  People exited and entered as my escape elevator hit different floors.

  At one floor, the elevator filled with passengers, people with VISITOR tags talking about the evening news, some dazed and confused, most just looking bored and hungry. A blond girl nodded at me as she was wheeled past by a woman in a green gown. She closed her eyes. One man smiled, nodded, but didn’t say anything. He tugged nervously at his red Afro and scratched at his hands and knuckles and soon I heard the voices of Big Man and the young girl in the red uniform, standing by the elevator door, their backs to me, talking excitedly.

  “He just ran out?” said Big Man, not without admiration.

  “He just ran,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just started my shift. Nobody told me that room was filled and it wasn’t on my chart. I thought it was a mistake. He had no gown and his street clothes on. I thought he was a discharge who had fallen asleep or something.”

  “Not your fault,” said Big Man.

  “What was his problem?”

  “Heroin,” said Big Man.

  “Ah,” said the young girl. “Makes sense. How long was he a member?”

  “Long time,” Big Man lied. “But TSP can’t help nobody that don’t wanna get better.”

  “Nope.”

  From the sound of it, I had been held in some kind of drug withdrawal room for TSP members.

  “Well he’s long gone.”

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “I’m so sorry. He’s long gone.”

  When the girl said this, Big Man clenched his large fist. I crouched down and hid behind other passengers until the elevator landed on the first floor, and everyone got off. Like a leopard returning to the jungle after being caged, I walked briskly for the street, hiding in the crowd. I was about fifty feet from the exit when I saw the girl in red and Big Man again. They had spotted me, and my heart began to beat like a small fish on the deck of the Titanic. It’s over. They got you, Santana.

  For a frozen moment, Big Man stood there, rubbing his hands and looking at me, confidence overcoming him, a hunter with his prey in sight. Then, confident, he stalked me slowly, on tiptoe, and I almost laughed, because there’s nothing funnier than a huge man walking on tiptoe.

  I moved toward the door, getting closer and closer. I imagined Big Man beating me with his fists, his hard knuckles beating into my face, his professional rage becoming more and more terrible. And I, as many before me, was crushed like an insect beneath the arms of steel and kicked about the halls of agony by the Mean Machine of TSP.

  You’ve lost, said my heart. But I ran out through the door into the wan light of the empty street. I heard the rumble of traffic and taxis and trucks, and it was still as humid as the night they choked me in. Big Man ran too, faster and faster behind me, gaining ground in the night. There was a matter of professional pride in his chase. I saw traffic ahead. I thought about making a sudden stop and using Big Man’s weight against him, tossing him headfirst into the cars ahead of me. But that might kill him, and he’s just a worker trying to do his job, I thought, when another man, even bigger than Big Man, jumped off a concrete stoop as I ran past.

  “Stop him!” Big Man yelled. But the other man didn’t even try to slow me down. I glanced back and saw him do something I didn’t expect. As Big Man ran past him, he threw out a muscled arm and caught Big Man under the chin, and Big Man’s legs went flying forward, and he slammed onto his back with a sound like a redwood falling.

  Nicky Brown! I shot faster along the street, hearing Nicky’s pounding feet following me, until I could finally see that I was on the corner of 47th and 8th Avenue. I looked across the street and saw the closed doors of TSP directly opposite what looked like an abandoned building on the outside—the building I had escaped from.

  Nicky, carrying a large green duffel bag, rushed with me to the corner of 47th Street, asked a white lady to hail a cab for us, then we jammed in the back.

  “Williamsburg,” I said.

  Before the cabbie could protest, Nicky said, “Drive!”

  “I prefer not to.”

  “I didn’t ask you your preferences,” Nicky said, stuffing forty bucks into the money slot dangling from the partition window, flipping it from the passenger side to the driver.

  I tried, with Nicky, to find Giovanni in Williamsburg again. No luck.

  “Harlem,” I said, jumping back into the cab, closing my eyes, and shaking my head.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Harlem. Nicky dropped me off at 124th and I entered the three-story brownstone that housed St. James and Company, dark oak walls, through the electronic door, went past and flirted with Kelly Diaz, office manager, Sugar Hill, kid, husband, twenty-five, big-boned, big-breasted, Colombian, short purple hair, through her living-room office and up to Joy’s office with the glass desk, two chairs, file cabinet, and fresh flowers.

  Somebody was playing me like a bongo drum. It was hot and humid and it looked like the sun and the dark rain clouds above me were in a fight and I was caught in their shadow with no umbrella. Typical.

  How I hated New York that morning. Maybe everyone hates the place they were born at a time like that. But New York seemed to deserve a little extra dose of loathing, felt like walking through a putrid mouth full of eight million rotten teeth.

  Joy entered, hair cut short and tight to her perfectly round head and dark Benin mask of a face, tall, beautiful and stylish always, in a charcoal-gray blouse and pants with short black boots. “Where do you think this Giovanni got all that money for that marble in Williamsburg, Chicklet?”

  “Mara Gupta and Edgar Gupta,” I said.

  Hank lumbered in, red-faced, behind his wife Joy, also tall but with remnants of an egg breakfast on the salmon-colored shirt and tie draped tightly on his chunky frame, carrying a file under his arm. Tossing me a doughnut, he bit into the one he was holding and nodded his head. “Delish.”

  Joy slapped the doughnut out of Hank’s hand and kicked it across the room.

  Hank looked at me in shock. “She totally caught me off guard on that one.”

  “When I want to be a widow,” said Joy, “I’ll feed you those doughnuts, intravenously if I have to. Or you can leave me for a woman who doesn’t care about you and eat all the Bow Ties and Boston creams you want.”

  Hank laughed, picked up the doughnut, and put it in the trash. “I thought you had my back, Chico? Why didn’t you warn me, buddy?”

  “How was Ireland?” I asked, biting into my doughnut.

  “Beautiful,” Hank said, passing a hand across his thinning brown hair. “The beer is warm and the land is green and my
family tree is full of nuts.”

  “Congrats,” I said. “Okay, before you bust out the vacation slides what about Giovanni Vaninni?”

  Hank pulled the file from under his arm and read, “Giovanni’s father was a failed artist and an anarchist. He lived on a very small pension from a university job in Siena. He’s dead. His mother was also a professor. Also dead. Kelly checked it out. Giovanni inherited nothing except a grandfather who was a member of the Italian Fascist party. His grandfather was hung by his fellow townspeople in front of Giovanni’s father as a boy.”

  “With that kind of history,” I said, “I could understand how Giovanni’s father could maybe grow up hating authority, and how he could have passed that on to Giovanni like a gold watch and how Giovanni would be a perfect suspect in terms of Gabby Gupta’s disappearance. Tell me about the statue.”

  Hank sounded off: “Michelangelo’s David weighs between six and nine tons, that’s without the pedestal.”

  “Giovanni told me he wanted to sculpt two wrestling figures, David and Goliath. Let’s say that’s twenty tons of marble. Where does a starving artist get the money for twenty tons of marble? Not even counting the shipping charges.”

  “Plus,” said Joy. “He didn’t get that marble in the U.S. He had it shipped from Italy. A place called Carrara, same spot Michelangelo got his rock for the David sculpture and Edgar Gupta got the marble for his house. Your hunch was right.”

  “Giovanni was tired of being the starving artist. Hunger, I understand. I know what that’s like. Giovanni’s got expensive marble, a bad back, and a need for painkiller. With money from Mara Gupta for keeping an eye out for Joey and Edgar Gupta for digging up dirt on TSP, he could finish his statue. That’s all artists want, isn’t it?”

  Hank nodded. “To finish their masterpiece.”

  I added, “Also, I thought maybe Giovanni got rid of Gabby Gupta to frame Joey and help Edgar Gupta fulfill his dream of destroying TSP by dividing it. Or maybe Giovanni got rid of Gabby to frame Joey and help Mara Gupta fulfill her dream of becoming president. Maybe he got rid of Gabby for both of them and they all gave him a bit of extra money for his sculpture. But then a funny thing happens.”

  “What?” said Joy.

  “Esther Sanchez got murdered.”

  “I thought they caught the guy who did that?”

  “What’s the connection?” asked Hank.

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” I said.

  Outside, I pulled out that pack of Djarum cigarettes that I had gotten from Chase Gupta and had been sitting brown in my pocket like a bad penny, lit up, sucked the dark burning clove smoke into my lungs and let the punishment begin. I heard once that clove cigarettes made your lungs bleed. Sounds good. Maybe it was just an urban legend. Sure. Just one. One pack never killed anybody. Or maybe it did. But who cares, right?

  The smoke was sweet and it burned and my sides hurt and my gut hurt. But they have not killed you, Santana. Not yet. Joey and Zena. You stupid sucker. Find Giovanni, I thought.

  Desperate times call for desperate . . .

  I picked up my phone.

  I dialed.

  I heard: “Puerto Rico!”

  “Elvis,” I said.

  “It’s Elvis, papá. The freakin’ Porto Reakin from El Barrio, baby. What’s up?”

  “Not much,” I said. “I need to meet up with you. Ask you a few questions about Zena Gupta and Joey and what you know about Giovanni Vaninni. I think that that Yayo kid from Washington Heights may be innocent of having anything to do with Esther Sanchez’s death. We need to team up, like you said.”

  “Can Pedro Sanchez come along?”

  “Pedro Sanchez?”

  “Pedro is Pablo’s older brother. Pedro’s a badass. Black sheep. All that shit. He just flew into town from D.R. He’s mad. I told him what you said about how you didn’t think Yayo killed his mother. He’s got a gun and he’s confused.”

  “Great,” I said.

  I didn’t know Pablo had a brother. Maybe Pablo didn’t think his brother, like Father Ravi’s brother, was my business either. Pedro was just another irrelevant detail. Did I mention how I felt about irrelevant details?

  “Don’t tell Pablo or your girlfriend Chase. You and this Pedro meet me tonight.”

  “Gonzalez y Gonzalez on Broadway,” said Elvis. “I’m Johnnie Walker Black. What’s your poison?”

  “Aspirin.”

  “Say what?”

  “White Russians.”

  “You got it.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  That night, in Gonzalez y Gonzalez, I walked past the black Porsche toward bouncers in black T-shirts and black pants checking IDs; pretty, bejeweled, and overly made-up women in skimpy clothes, butts and boobs a-poppin’; and their macho dates, who looked around proudly and sneaked glances at the dates of other macho men, careful not to stare too hard at the wrong man’s woman. Reggaeton music blasted as though the human ear drum were its mortal enemy.

  Go get those beers to start. Go past the happy pink drunk waving hello outside the bar. Hello, pal. Go into the dark room. Good. Whitney Houston sings “Learning to love yourself it is the greatest love of all.” Order. Samuel Adams. Slam ’em back, Chico. One. Two. Good. Look at your shadow on the red walls. Like Nicky says, as long as you cast a shadow, baby, there’s hope, you may live and die happy yet.

  Your teeth hurt. Your head hurts. Your guts hurt. Heart? You have no heart, Santana.

  I slammed back my third beer and looked up and saw Elvis at the bar talking to a pretty hostess dressed in black, his arm around her thin exposed waist.

  I also saw that Chase Gupta was sitting at the bar sipping from a cold bottle of Corona, a delicate diamond bracelet dangling from her thick brown wrist. She wore jeans and a tight blue blouse; her breasts spilled over the top like brown balloons. Her heavy makeup, blue eye shadow, and thick black mascara made her look like a raccoon, plump, rich Asian Indian girl, wannabe trendy, all jet-black curls and big hips, gazing jealously at Elvis.

  Sure, the time would come when Elvis’s good looks and youth would fade, and he would fall to earth, become mortal. In the onslaught of years, he would join everyone else, painted with the same sickly mortal brush. Every faded movie star and fashion model knew the sting of the short and ungrateful human memory, the indignity of being replaced by a younger, prettier face. The long, cold winter was coming. But this night was Elvis’s night.

  And this night Elvis belonged to Chase.

  Despite this, Elvis stood in the nightspot called Gonzalez y Gonzalez, half bar, half dance hall, half restaurant, basking in the glow he saw reflected back in the eyes of women who passed and found him irresistible.

  “Vaya, Puerto Rico,” Elvis said and threw back his shot of whiskey. “After this is over, I wanna treat you to a buff spa at Seabrook’s.”

  “What’s a buff spa?”

  “A place where they give manicures and pedicures and a mint-cream exfoliation. It will change your life.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But no.”

  Chico Santana don’t buff spa.

  “Maybe we could do a Miami weekend after we find Gabby and this crap is all over?”

  “Chase, too?” I said. “Since you don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without her.”

  Elvis laughed. “Sorry. I had to bring her. But I’ll make it up to you. Miami is boys only.”

  He tapped a Newport cigarette out of a crumpled pack and offered me one.

  “I got my own,” I said and pulled my Djarums.

  “Good,” Elvis said. “That’s better, Chico. You’re not just a private investigator looking for the boss’s daughter anymore. There’s plans being made for you. Me and Chase already talked. You and me, members. And you won’t even have to give anything up. You can give up giving things up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “TSP’s gotta change,” said Elvis. “Life’s too short. Enjoy a good smoke, a stiff drink, a good meal, a good lay. You’re not going to li
ve forever, papá. Believe me, I looked into it. We got a lot to talk about.”

  We went outside and lit up.

  “Chase and I are getting married tomorrow,” said Elvis.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Where’s Pablo’s brother?”

  Elvis poked his head back into Gonzalez y Gonzalez and waved at Chase, who signaled the man sitting across from her.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Pedro Sanchez came outside, and for a moment I could have sworn he was Pablo. Pablo had grown a neat handlebar mustache, and he was many pounds thinner, older, but he was Pablo, walking toward me.

  “Pedro,” said the man by way of introduction; he had a Spanish accent as thick as guava nectar. “Mi mother es dead. Es no good.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Es no good.”

  I looked at his clothes. His guyabana shirt and pants were white and pressed. His alligator shoes were shined. Pedro was not Pablo. He told me he was a former cop and now a private security guard for the wealthy from Santo Domingo and seemed, by the hard look in his eyes and the strength of his rough handshake, like the type who would plug a man without even blinking for shoplifting a green banana.

  “So you’re a former cop,” I said as we walked back inside to the bar, after our smoke, where Chase was sitting. Pedro ordered rum. Straight up.

  “Sí,” said Pedro. He paused. “Many years ago. I also working in the circus.”

  “What’d you do in the circus?”

  “I was el midget,” Pedro said, laughed, and slammed back some rum.

  The four of us went to a corner table already set with four glasses of water and nachos and salsa.

  “Have you seen Giovanni?” I asked.

  Chase told me that she had not but that she had good news: a deal had been struck, TSP had backed down, Elvis was officially reinstated as a member of The Superman Project, and Hari Lachan was like voted the new president of TSP. And a few days ago, Chase had bought Elvis brushes, paints, oils, acrylic, glue, and every other imaginable painter’s accoutrements.

  “What the hell for?” Pedro wondered aloud, grumpy.