RK
Later, as he watched India-Vision in his office, Raj was interrupted by a knock on his door.
Ritu and Neal walked in, arm in arm.
“How do you do, young man?”
“So nice to see you again, Mr. Raj,” Neal said.
“Yes, yes, we did meet at the Miss Little India pageant, right?”
“Yes. And thanks to you, I met Ritu that night.”
“Oh no, these are all events that fate has ordained,” Raj demurred.
“Mr. Kumar,” Ritu said, “Neal and I were married this morning at City Hall.”
“Congratulations, congratulations.”
“We need your advice. You see, Ritu and I, well, we . . .” Neal began.
“We got married . . .” Ritu added.
“Blessings, blessings.”
“. . . without my father,” Neal continued. “Well, he doesn’t know yet and I want to seek your advice to smooth things over.”
“Oh, I see. But your wife is a blessing to your family.”
“Yes sir. But my father—”
“I will tell you, young man, that only a few get to be married to a girl as lovely, honest, and wise as your bride. Treasure her. Once you have children, I guarantee you all will be well.”
“Children?”
“Yes. I know Ritu’s chart. And all happiness unencumbered by obstructions will be yours in this union. Wait till you have good news of a grandchild and then go to India. All will be well.”
“I shouldn’t tell my father then?”
“No. Wait a few months. Then you will have two good things to tell him.”
Ritu looked at Neal and gave him that sweet smile that Raj knew so well.
“Go and enjoy each other,” Raj counseled. “Give it time. All will be well. All will be well.”
Neal reached for his wallet, “Can I give you something?”
“Oh, please. Please . . . it’s my pleasure.”
Neal shook Raj’s hand, and the happy newlyweds left his office.
Raj watched the couple from his second-floor window. As they walked away, arm in arm once again, Ritu turned to look up at his window. She met his gaze for a moment and held it. She nodded slightly and then turned her attention once more to her husband.
He was now alone in his office above 74th Street, with all the hustle and flow of life below. With his posters of Meena Kumari. With his foldout chairs. With his TV and DVD player on a stand. He flicked off the Open sign outside his window.
From his desk drawer he took out the DVD. He needed some pleasure too—life could not only be work. He dimmed the lights and sat on the floor cushion, as he always did to watch. Nothing could interrupt him for three hours. He put on the movie Pakeezah. The music stirred and then there she was. Looking for her love. Full of grace. Dancing her pain away. Her soul unappreciated by the wealthy patrons. She is a courtesan who doesn’t get to be with her love, the prince. The callous king forbids it. She has no one to help her. And Raj weeps for her once again as he hears his beloved sing:
I, silently, o sir, will open the gate.
Darling, slowly shall I open the gate.
Stay awhile, o handsome friend.
O save me from agony . . .
VIERNES LOCO
BY K.J.A. WISHNIA
Corona
It’s never good when you open your front door and the first thing you see is uniforms. Only this time, they were military dress green, not 110th Precinct blue, and lucky for us they wanted the house next door. Bad luck for the Mantilla family, whose oldest boy, Freddie, joined up seeking the fast track to citizenship. And now he’s going to get it—posthumously.
The following Thursday I’m standing with the family as the flag-draped coffin is about to be lowered into a hole overshadowed by the Long Island Expressway and a recycling plant. The last notes of “Taps” float by on the wind, mingling with the Doppler-shifting wee-oo-wee-oo of a passing police siren. Someone’s not at peace with the Lord out there.
A white-gloved finger presses the play button on a boom box, and the crash of angry Spanish ghetto rap rips the stillness to shreds. Freddie chose this music as his final shout-out to the world, and, if I know Freddie, as a final screw-you to all the white boys in his unit who would have gone with “Amazing Grace.” The honor guard salutes stiffly as cars roar by on the overpass.
I go up to the cops who brought Freddie’s uncle here, and ask them to take the guy’s handcuffs off for five minutes so he can hug his family. It takes a moment, but they do it for me.
“You on a case?” says Officer Sirota.
“Friend of the family.”
“Uh,” he grunts. “Say, you know what that’s about?”
There’s a group of mourners dancing around a grave across the street in Mount Zion Cemetery. I tell him it’s a splinter sect of Orthodox Jews who believe that their former leader, Rabbi Aaron Teitelboym, is the Messiah, so every year they gather at his grave on the anniversary of his death to celebrate his imminent resurrection.
“That so?” says Sirota. “How long’s he been dead?”
“Nine years.”
“Nine years? Man, it only took Jesus three days. So I guess that’s one up for our side.”
The lieutenant presents Freddie’s mom, Irene, with the purple heart and bronze star, and salutes her. She presses the medals to her chest, and hugs a color photo of her smiling boy, the sharp-eyed soldier who waved his comrades away from the roadside bomb that shattered his skull and left a smoking crater of that handsome young face. It was a closed casket service.
Too soon, they snap the cuffs back on Uncle Reynaldo and escort him to the squad car. I wait my turn as close relatives go up and hug my neighbor. She’s clutching Freddie’s brother Felipe, who’s already sprouting a teen mustache and getting pretty big for a twelve-year-old.
Felipe wrenches his arm away from her and seeks out the masculine ritual of swapping greetings with his cousin Ray Ray, who I once helped dodge a graffiti rap that could have gotten nasty if the cops had felt like pressing it. Just being caught with “graffiti instruments” is a Class B misdemeanor, and it doesn’t help that in order to get proper respect as a graffiti writer in the barrio, the supplies have to be stolen. Reparations were costly, but worth it, since that dark-skinned Dominican kid is now working on a twenty-one-game hitting streak carried over from his previous season at Newtown High School, and the rumor is that he’s being scouted by the Mets.
That night we climb up onto the roof so Felipe can look at the glittering crown of Shea Stadium on the horizon.
“Yo, Filomena,” he says. “I hear los Mets are gonna put their game on real thick this year.”
“They definitely have a shot at it.”
“Remember the subway series when that cabrón de Yanqui Clemens threw the broken bat at Piazza?”
“Sure.”
“Freddie got some tickets for me and Ray Ray. We was in the upper deck, the three of us doing mad daps all around.” He points at the bright lights as if the exact spot is marked for all time, which I suppose it is, in a way. I know what he’s thinking, but he says it anyway. “Some day Ray Ray gonna be playing center field out there.”
* * *
The next morning, I’m training my new part-time office assistant, a tanned and freckle-faced sophomore at Queens College named Cristina González. They’re putting her through the wringer at that school, making her take two semesters of Composition, which is encouraging since half the college kids I see lie to me on their resumés and think they can get away with writing crapola like, My mother’s a strong women and roll model for all American’s, which doesn’t look too good in a report.
The last applicant didn’t mention his credit card scam and drug convictions when I asked him if there was anything unusual in his past that I should know about. When I caught it on a routine background check, he said, “Hey, in my neighborhood, that’s nothing unusual.”
“You mean, I beat out a convicted felon for this j
ob?” says Cristina. “Gee, thanks.”
It’s hard to find good help for $6.50 an hour, which is all I can afford to pay. But striking out on your own is risky at my age, and I wouldn’t even be able to pay that much if my former bosses at Davis & Brown Investigations didn’t toss a few heavy bones my way, continuing a long-standing American business practice of subcontracting out to cheap immigrant labor like me.
So I’m sitting in my eight-by-fourteen storefront office, directly beneath the flight path of every other jet approaching LaGuardia Airport, trying to debug the Hebrew font we installed for a case involving an Orthodox congregation in Kew Gardens Hills. The font’s right-to-left coding has defeated the security protocols and migrated to some of the neighboring programs, causing system commands to come up randomly in Hebrew.
Oy vey, couldn’t it have at least been Yiddish?
I look up as a man in a light gray business suit who I’ve been expecting knocks on the glass. I buzz the door open for the junior executive, who looks like he’s worried about contracting malaria through the soles of his wingtips from walking on these cracked sidewalks.
“Miss Buscarella?” he says.
“Close enough. It’s Buscarsela.”
He doesn’t seem to be listening as he sits in a chair that was once bright orange and hands me his card, which says his name is F. Scott Anderson, and his title is Assistant Director of Product Security for the Syndose Corporation.
“What can I do for you on this fine spring day, Mr. Anderson?”
He snaps open his briefcase and pulls out a plastic bottle of dandruff shampoo with a blue-green label you can find in any drugstore in the northeast.
“What’s wrong with this?” he says, holding up the bottle.
I check the label and tell him, “That used to be an eight-ounce size, and now you’re selling six and a half ounces for the same price.”
He doesn’t bite. He just places the plastic bottle on my desk and pulls a seemingly identical one out of his briefcase. “How about this one?”
I study it for a moment, and it’s obvious that the blue-green color isn’t as saturated as it should be, and the white lettering isn’t perfectly aligned with the other colors on the label.
“It’s counterfeit,” I announce.
Cristina butts in. “What kind of dumbass would counterfeit shampoo? Ain’t no money in that.”
I’m about to tell her to keep out of this, but Mr. Anderson beats me to it. He says, “Counterfeiting and product diversion cost my company several million dollars a year. The police just raided a store in Jackson Heights and seized 24,000 bottles of counterfeit shampoo. In one store. That’s a tremendous economic loss.”
“To say nothing of the babies who get sick from diluted baby formula,” I say.
He smiles. “Mr. Davis told me that if anyone could find an illicit manufacturing operation in Corona, you could.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. What makes you think Corona’s the place to start?”
“Because the store owner in Jackson Heights gave the police an important clue. He said one of the suspects had dark hair, a gang tattoo, and listened to Spanish music.”
I wait for more. Nothing doing.
“That’s your clue?” I say, because I practically fit that description myself.
“Well, no. Not just Spanish music, some special kind. It’s in the report. It also said something about the tattoo indicating that he’s Ecuadorian. Anyway, they figure he’s a member of a street gang like the Latin Kings or MS-13.”
Wow, that’s some terrific random profiling there, Mr. Anderson. But the rent’s due, so I try to keep a placid surface. And tell him, “The Latin Kings are Puerto Rican, the Maras are Salvadoran, and they rarely let anybody else in. I don’t know of any Ecuadorians who’ve jumped in with them, but you never know what could happen as the new generation gets Americanized. I’ll check it out for you.”
He gives me the cocksure grin of a man who just bought exactly what he wanted, as always. But after we sign and file away our copies of the contracts, this glorified errand boy looks like he can’t wait to bug out of the jungle before the headhunters get wind of his scent.
I usually meet the reps from the big clients at the cushy offices of Davis & Brown in downtown Jamaica, but I was getting a weird vibe from this bunch so I just said screw it, I’ll take their money, but I want this guy to come to me and have to drag his skinny white ass to the barrio. Let him feel what it’s like to be a stranger, on alien turf. And I must say, I’m awful glad I did that.
* * *
I start with the police reports of the big shampoo bust and other recent crimes relating to counterfeiting, product diversion, and the rest of the gray-goods racket covering the area between Elmhurst and Corona south of Roosevelt Avenue, and Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst north of Roosevelt. That’s right, East Elmhurst is due north of Elmhurst. What do you expect from a borough where you have to know a different language on every block, where pigeons ride the A train to Rockaway Beach to scavenge from the garbage, where you know that Spider-Man lives at 20 Ingram Street in Forest Hills? No, really. He does.
Most of the cases deal with pirating—unauthorized duplication of CDs, DVDs, and computer software—which are of no interest to my client. The counterfeiting is mostly luxury items like watches, perfume, and designer handbags peddled by West African immigrants on fold-up tables, and the occasional case of Mouton-Cadet with labels made on a laser printer that fool the eye but not the fingers (they lack the raised embossments). But five-and-dime products like shampoo and antibacterial soap? Not much. Time to check out the shelves at the local farmacias.
* * *
Latinos take their music seriously, especially on Roosevelt Avenue east of 102nd Street. There’s a music store on every other block, and the cars—from tricked-out pimpmobiles to body-rot jobs with plastic wrap covering the gaping holes where the passenger windows should be—have top-of-the-line subwoofers pumping out bachata and merengue loud enough to compete with the 7 train roaring by overhead. And not one noise complaint is ever called in to the boys at the One-Ten. Though I do think that a spoiler on a battered Toyota Corolla is kind of pointless.
The store owner in the police report described the suspect’s nationality based on his choice of music and a tattoo of the Ecuadorian flag on his left bicep. But the only music style around here that is exclusively Ecuadorian is pasillo, which is too old-fashioned and sentimental for any self-respecting gangbanger to listen to. He probably meant reggaetón, the Spanish version of gangsta rap, which crosses ethnic borders in all directions, to the dismay of proud parents everywhere.
And the flag is not a “gang” tattoo. Most people don’t know the basic difference between the Colombian and Ecuadorian flags, which boldly fly yellow, blue, and red from second-floor windows and storefronts. (And to anyone who complains about Latinos in the U.S. flying the flags of their homelands, I dare you to go down Fifth Avenue on St. Pat’s Day, or to Little Italy during the Feast of San Gennaro, and try to take down the flags. See what happens.)
I stop by a few farmacias and botánicas and find a number of Syndose knock-offs, including a tube of minty toothpaste with the brand name Goldbloom misspelled Goldvloom, a mistake that only a Latino would make.
The panadería and ferretería—that is, the bakery and hardware store—are displaying handmade posters of Ray Ray in his Newtown High uniform, with his full name, Raymundo Reyes, keeping track of his hitting streak, which after yesterday’s ninth-inning blooper now stands at twenty-two games. Go, Ray Ray.
We take our sports seriously too, although soccer’s the favorite among Ecuadorians. It didn’t get much press up here, but a coach back home was shot when he didn’t select the ex-president’s son for the Under-20 World Cup in Argentina. Yeah, in case I haven’t mentioned it, Ecuador’s major exports are bananas, cocoa, shrimp, and unstable politicians, which is why so many of us come here hoping to catch a piece of the American dream. And sports offers a wa
y out for many, even if it remains a distant dream most of the time. Either way, the bright lights of Shea Stadium cast a long shadow over the neighborhood.
Interviewing the store managers yields a range of responses. One Salvadoreño says the cops told him not to discuss the case without the state attorney general’s consent, but he won’t give me a name or a badge number, or sign a statement to that effect, even though I tell him it’s a bunch of tonterías. You know, B.S., but even the legal immigrants don’t want to tangle with the authorities when their citizenship applications are pending.
Another place is staffed by sullen teenagers making minimum wage who don’t seem to know anything but one-syllable words, and the next place has employed some fresh-off-the-boats who are still having trouble telling the difference between five- and ten-dollar bills. Then I hit a place on 104th Street where the manager talks a Caribbean mile-a-minute about beisbol and the pride of Corona, but he clams up when I ask about the antibiotics in the faded yellow boxes.
“How’d they get so faded? You leave them lying out in the sun?”
Dead air.
I make a show of flipping through my notes, writing a few things down very slowly.
“They’ve just been on the shelf a long time,” he says.
“Then it’s probably time to replace them,” I say, picking up one of the boxes. The expiration date is two years down the road. I mention this. “They can’t have been here that long.”
More silence.
I like the silence. It tells me a lot. “I’ll be back,” I say.
Next up is a drugstore run by a Colombiano whose attitude is: It’s the same stuff for half the price, so his customers buy it. What’s the big deal?
The next guy’s a compatriota, a paisano, an Ecuatoriano like me, who turns into a walking attitude problem when he accuses me of helping the big gringo corporations protect their money instead of going after the real criminals, like the hijos de puta who charged a couple of hundred would-be immigrants $5,000 each for a boat ride to Florida, then left them floundering in rough seas about 200 miles from the coast of Mexico; or the sinvergüenzas who hire day laborers and abandon them without pay in the middle of Nassau County because they can’t go and complain to the Board of Labor; or the perros at the Hartley Hotel in midtown Manhattan who laid off one-third of their employees after 9/11 and told the rest of them to work double shifts if they wanted to keep their jobs, because business was bad. So they were just using 9/11 as an excuse to run the old speed-up.
New York City Noir Page 103
