"Gulag?" said the DA, reading. "For Christ sake. Where does it end? Discos named after Auschwitz? Dachau? Bergen-Belsen? Sometimes you just want to pull the handle and flush. So that's it?"
"Yes. As far as the Sixth Precinct Detective Squad is concerned."
"What do you think?"
"I think it's… very thin."
"Thin? It's cellophane. It's Saran Wrap."
"But I think it was Tamarino's cocaine. And I don't think keys walked out of there by themselves."
The DA sighed. "Missing keys. Not enough here for 220.3 and even less for a 125.15."
The ADA scrolled up the numbers on his brain screen: sale of a controlled substance, B felony; second-degree manslaughter, C felony. "Mullen said, off the record, that he'd be willing to arrest him and shake his tree to see what falls off, but I didn't think you wanted to go that route."
The DA stared into middle space. "You don't remember the Kennedy case, do you? David Kennedy. Couple of years ago, '85, '86?"
"April 25, 1984. The Palm Beach police charged two bellhops at the Brazilian Court Hotel with selling cocaine and conspiracy to sell cocaine. Six months later they both copped a nolo to selling and the conspiracy charge was dropped. Eighteen months' probation and expungement."
The DA nodded. "Good, Ed. That's good preparation."
"Thank you, sir. Sir? My name is Bill, actually? Bill Allard?"
"Jesus Christ. I didn't sleep. I'm sorry. Jesus. Of course you're Bill."
"By the way, I thought you handled that question very well."
"Question?"
"On Nightline, about whether you're interested in the AG job?"
"Oh, right. Okay, so the Kennedy case… what?"
"It was a very unpopular prosecution. Here are the editorials." He put a manila folder on the DA's desk.
The DA looked at them blearily. "You want to gist them for me?"
"'Prosecutorial zeal' is all over them. There's not a lot of support out there for rich white kids who OD on cocaine. And they had much more to go on in the Kennedy case than this one. They had witnesses who told the grand jury they heard one of the bellhops bragging about how he sold cocaine to a Kennedy. Even with that it was a no-win."
"You know who I feel sorry for in all this?"
The ADA shook his head.
"Ethel. What that woman's been through. Well, look, we're not going to let that influence us, but Jesus Christ, Mullen has to make his own decisions, damnit. What does he think this office is? This really, this really pisses me off."
"Yes, sir."
"You tell Mullen to make his own fucking decisions. If he's got a case, bring us a case. If he doesn't have a case, don't bring us a case. And while you're at it, tell him I do not appreciate the way this thing has been handled. Tell him I'm going to speak to Brown about this-personally."
"Yes, sir."
Helen said, "It's Morley Safer, from 60 Minutes."
"All right. We all set on this, Ed?… Morley?"
6
Charley sat by the light of the fire, Spook beside him, staring at the mailbox in the display case on the wall surrounded by all the leather-bound books.
The orphanage was started by Mexican nuns who fled over the border into Texas during the anticlerical hysteria of the revolution when three of their order were raped and crucified on saguaro cacti. They bought an abandoned farm on the outskirts of McAllen. They found him in the makeshift mailbox one cold winter morning, badly dehydrated and the color of plum, swaddled in a week-old comics section of The Star. They named him Karl Becker after the local fishmonger. All the children were named after local merchants. Sister Rosa Encarnacion had hit on the scheme. Herr Becker would show up every Saturday afternoon in his truck with whatever he hadn't been able to sell that week, cases of reeking skate and shark, sometimes a discolored eel or two. They changed his legal name to Charley when America entered the Great War in 1917, but the nuns went on calling him Carlos.
Old Raul looked up and saw Carlos bleeding from his nose and both ears and a tooth was gone, the second this week.
"Aiy, Carlito." He took the boy in and washed his face and plugged his nose and let him swish some homemade mescal around inside his mouth, which left a pleasing numbness on the boy's sore gums. He let him watch him prepare that night's dinner, some horsemeat donated by a rancher with two orphans named after him. Raul tasted the horse and chopped up another handful of the slender green serrano peppers he used liberally to disguise the rottenness of the meat. He held one perfect specimen up for Carlos to admire. Carlos reached for it. "Con cuidado," Raul urged. "I knew a man who went blind because he rubbed his eyes after holding a pepper." Raul told glorious lies. He had a scar on his belly from where he'd been knifed; he told Carlos that was where General Pershing had shot him while pursuing Pancho Villa after Villa's (and Raul's) historic attack on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. "Black Jack" Pershing had become the hero of the war with Germany, so Carlos was extremely impressed to know someone who had been shot by him. Raul said the bullet-made of silver-had been intended for Villa but that Raul had thrown himself in its path. Villa had not wanted to leave him there, wounded, but Raul insisted. Raul expertly sliced the pepper into thin strips and then cut those crosswise so that no piece was larger than the head of a matchstick. "The serrano is like Christ," he said, stirring the pepper into the horsemeat stew. "It takes all the sins of the world unto itself. That is why it is so full of fire." Carlos took a furtive pull on the bottle of mescal. Raul saw it but didn't say anything.
Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez came for him again that night, stuffing a gag in his mouth and carrying him, squirming, out of the converted barn that served as a dormitory, to one of the shacks. Lockmuller had a length of barbed wire. He looped it loosely around Carlos' neck while the others held him. "You bite me again and I'll strangle you dead." Carlos watched as Lockmuller unbuttoned his trousers. Gomez kicked him from behind. They'd demonstrated what they'd do to him on a polecat if he told the sisters: gouging out its eyes, cutting off its feet, then hanging it by its tail over a fire.
The next morning one of the nuns noticed Carlos wasn't saying his morning prayers along with the others. At first they thought it was willful and punished him for it, but as the weeks went by without the boy speaking, they began to wonder. They took him to the doctor who had five boys named after him. He poked about Carlos' mouth and couldn't find anything and suggested withholding food and water from him to see if that would get him to talk. Sister Imaculata announced to the other sisters her conviction that Carlito's muteness was the work of the Dark One. The priest who said Masses on Sunday in the old barn was a bent old man and kinder than most, but at the age where not enough oxygen was getting through to his brain. He came principally for Raul's mescal. Carlos recognized the smell on Padre's breath as he peered into his face, trying to see the Devil through the two small windows on the boy's soul. He hung a couple of rosaries around Carlito's neck and splashed him with holy water until he was sopping.
"Ego te expulso!" he shouted. Grappling with the Dark One required strengthening himself with Raul's mescal. Carlos calmly watched, dripping-wet with holy water, as the old priest invoked the Lord to drive out the evil inside him. The Devil was too much for him, however, and after one session the old man passed out on the floor. When he awoke he told of a dream he'd had in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and told him that she had taken away the boy's speech as a sign of Her Favor. Sister Imaculata wondered about this, having smelled his breath, but she knew herself that the ways of God are not to be fathomed, and a priest, even drunk, is a priest, and so kept her suspicions to herself.
A year went by and one night Carlos awoke from a bad dream to see three silhouettes moving out the door: Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez. He followed them to the tractor shed. He crept up to the door and peered in and saw the three of them sitting around an oil lamp with magazine and newspaper pictures spread around. He saw they were pictures of Amelia Earhart, who'd just flown across the At
lantic Ocean, wherever that was. They had their trousers off and were dipping their hands into a can of axle grease and rubbing them on what the nuns called the lugar del diablo, the Devil's playground, if you will. Carlos watched. The nuns preached hard against this particular form of sin, saying it was like driving nails into the hands of Christ. It explained why they hadn't been dragging him off in the middle of the night the last few weeks.
Around midnight the following evening the entire orphanage was awoken by screams of intense pain. No one had ever heard such screams, even the nuns, who had witnessed some terrible things in their time. There was a moon out and there they could see Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the yard with no pants, holding their groins in a way that left little doubt as to the location of their agony, which seemed to increase with every minute. They jumped into the well, but this seemed to have no effect. By now the sisters had habited themselves and were trying to get from the wretched three some clue as to the cause of their pain, but they could give no coherent explanation. They just screamed and ran around in circles until the doctor came. He gave them injections that made them pass out. When they came to, he questioned them. He went to the tractor shed and examined the axle grease, found small bits of Serrano pepper mixed up in it. He suspected the nuns. The sisters locked up Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the root cellar for a couple of days. They emerged blinking like salamanders and scratching at chigger bites. They ran off a few days later and never returned. Shortly afterward, Carlos' powers of speech returned, an event the nuns celebrated by holding a candlelit prayer vigil on the top of a small hill nearby, where they planted a small wooden cross made by old Raul.
Four years passed and the Depression was on and there was not much to eat, mostly rotten produce wriggly with weevils and tortillas so thin the sunlight shone through them. One night while they were sipping mescal to take the edge off the hunger, Raul started to tell Carlos about a still someone had over in Pharr and what money they were making selling bootleg liquor. Raul had a small still for his mescal; it only produced a bottle every two days. Raul made a sketch on a piece of cardboard.
Next day Carlos organized the boys into teams. He and the first team stole the twenty feet of copper tubing from Ambrose's hardware; the second took a hundred pounds of corn from the troughs of Diefenbocker's hog farm. They set it up in an abandoned chicken shed a quarter mile down the road. The first few batches proofed out at somewhere over the lethal limit, occasioning one case of temporary blindness. Raul fine-tuned the proportions, sending the boys off to steal various ingredients-vanilla, ipecac, molasses, sugar-until it got so it went down without taking the esophagus with it. Raul knew a man named Geronimo, in Donna who said he'd take all he could get and sell it to the truckers on the Harlingen run. Carlos negotiated Geronimo's price up by half and within a month they were bringing in fifty dollars a week, a fortune. Carlos and Raul kept ten for themselves, and gave the rest to the nuns in the form of anonymous weekly donations of chickens, rice, chocolate bars and comics. The nuns held another candlelit vigil on the hill and planted another small cross of thanksgiving. Then Geronimo got arrested for stealing tires.
This was not Geronimo's first arrest and this time the Hidalgo County sheriff said he was going to put him away forever. Geronimo used his only bargaining chip and-nursing a grudge over Carlos' knocking his price up so-told about Carlos and the still, leaving out that he was a boy over at the Mexican nuns' orphanage outside of town. Thinking that it might enhance his situation, he embroidered some, telling the sheriff that this Carlos had got a little carried away and killed a man; he laid it on thicker than barbecue sauce. By the time he was finished the sheriff was passing out shotguns and calling in extra deputies and giving the order, as they lay in wait in a ditch by the chicken shed, to fire at the first sign of trouble. Then the sheriff barked, "Put your hands up in the air or we'll shoot!" A figure darted out of the shack and started to run, the moon caught his tin belt buckle and one of the deputies thought it was a gun and opened fire and soon they were all shooting and by the time it was over nine-year-old Irving Mayer-named for the town haberdasher-was on the ground with his legs and back full of buckshot. Charley took some pellets from the same blast in his thigh, but kept going, disappearing into the high grass in the darkness.
The bishop up in Corpus handled it cleverly, bringing the reporter with him to Irving's hospital bed and apostrophizing in his heavy brogue: What kind of a monster does this to hungry orphan children?-leaving aside for a moment the Eighteenth Amendment. It went all the way up to the governor's office in Austin. The sheriff had to resign and ended up as a six-dollar-a-week guard at the state penitentiary, the only consolation being that was where Geronimo was putting in his time.
Two nights after the shooting, Raul was on his knees in front of his little shrine to the Virgin, begging her for the fiftieth time that day to keep him from being arrested, when he heard the door creak open and saw Carlos, filthy, limping and one leg covered in dried blood.
He poured moonshine over his leg and removed what pellets he could. He kept the boy hidden there with him for a week until he had his strength back.
"I'll go tonight," said Carlos. "You want to come with me?"
Raul shook his head and pointed to his eyes, opalescent with cataracts. He packed some food for him and they stood outside and embraced. "Wait," said Raul. He went back into the shack and emerged with a rosary that he said Pancho Villa had once personally spat on and pressed it into Carlos' palm.
Carlos had gone half a mile when he turned back. There was a row of sycamores along the road outside the orphanage, and he kept in their shadows until he reached the mailbox. He had often dreamed about his mother, very clearly. He could hear her weeping as she carried him to it, hear her tears falling on the newspaper she'd wrapped around him. In the dream he tried to hold on to her as she put him inside the mailbox; then he was inside the mailbox, suffocating and trying to get out. He always woke up at this point, crying for his mother. Once one of the nuns-a young one-took him back to her bed with him and caressed him, even his lugar del diablo, which gave him wonderful sensations of warmth and happiness. Unfortunately, the nun went away not long afterward.
He pried the mailbox off its oak post and, cradling it in his arms, ran along the dirt road to the barking of dogs. It was five miles to the railroad tracks and by the time he reached them his wounds were running. The tracks ran north, to Alice and Corpus Christi. He knelt by the rails and dug a hole and buried the mailbox, marking the spot with a cairn of stones. He said a prayer over it, swearing an oath to come back and get it someday, then stretched out by the mound of stones and fell asleep. The sky was just turning blue over the Gulf when the whistle woke him. It was a fast train and it nearly killed him climbing on.
Charley stood. Spook's head jerked upright as it always did when he thought there might be a walk in the offing. His eyes watched Charley as he went to the phone by his bed. The one word he recognized-"Felix"-did not signify a walk. He put his head back on the warm carpet and went back to sleep.
7
They were sitting in the front of the black sedan, trying to keep awake by drinking strong, hot Cuban coffee out of the thermos the cook had packed for their duck-hunting trip in the Chesapeake. Everyone thought it was a good idea for the two of them to get away. Tasha's death had been so hard. A little shivering in a duck blind off the Eastern Shore would be just the thing, no telephones, no staff, only the two of them, passing the flask in the pre-dawn chill waiting for a flight of mallards.
They were in Alphabet Town, a herniated bulge of lower Manhattan jutting out into the East River, where the avenues are named after letters.
Charley was no good at waiting-most self-made rich people aren't; Felix was. His eyes never strayed from the top floor of number 316.
Charley checked his watch for the one-hundredth time. Just after 3:30 A.M. Better not drink any more coffee. He was jittery enough and he was tired of pissing in the alley. He stared at the boat in th
e vacant lot next to number 316. What was a boat doing on East Eighth Street between Avenues B and C?
Her lines reminded him some of the first boat he got work on out of Port Aransas after running away from the orphanage. She was eighteen, maybe twenty feet, and riding a wave of smashed-up chunks of white porcelain from old toilets and urinals, heaved out the building, probably, that used to occupy the lot-afloat on a sea of crappers. There was a ratty old heavy black armchair with springs and foam stuffing coming out sitting on her foredeck. Charley wondered who sat in it on hot summer nights, drinking wine and dreaming of black marlin. She had a name. It was spray-painted large on her hull: NOAH'S 8TH STREET YAGHT. Everything in this damn city was either misspelled or in Latin. He imagined God, fed up, with the enormity of the city's sins, loosing forty days and nights of acid rain and Noah's 8th Street Yaght rising up higher and higher, even higher than the World Trade Center, and coming to rest in the suburbs, atop Mount Kisco, the dove returning to Noah with a letter from the zoning commission saying his ark was in violation of local codes.
His eyes strayed to the car in front of them, a red Chevy, abandoned, up on blocks, the windows smashed in, glass all over, seats stripped. It had Connecticut plates and there was a bumper sticker proclaiming, somewhat risibly in the present context, BRAKE FOR WHALES. Whales were not a major concern in Alphabet Town. Here the mottoes tended more to: CRACK KILLS. LA LUCHA CONTINUA. OUR CHILDREN ARE DYING. A sidewalk Siqueiros had been busy painting heroic murals of veiny forearms impaled by hypodermic needles, eyes exploding from pent-up crack smoke. Someone had copied Edvard Munch's "The Cry" in a blackened doorway littered with vials and dried vomit. In Alphabet Town art was not for witty aperqus in rooms full of Chardonnay; it tried to keep you alive. But what, Charley wondered, did it mean: YOUR DICK IS IN YOUR HAND WAKE UP 1933?
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