by Peter Plate
Maimonides examined the dirt under his fingernails. “What’s the rush? It’s a beautiful summer day. San Francisco at its finest.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You, I have no time for.” Ephraim unloaded the briefcase onto the hood next to the laundry bag and unlatched the lid. The case snapped open with a squeak, revealing five stacks of used twenties. He said with unconcealed envy, “Christmas came early this year for you cocksuckers.”
Rook glowered at Maimonides. His forehead was varnished with sclerotic anger. His ears were black with wrath. Giving away money made him very emotional. “You bastards have been the death of me. You have no idea how far I’m going out of my way to be cool over this.”
Maimonides was derisive. The baby fat on his cheeks was sunny, the first sign of health a junkie has when he reduces his intake of opiates. His big hands were knotted with purple veins and bunched into scabby fists. “Incorrect. You should know the rules of the game. You started the problem. I solved it.”
Rook disagreed with Maimonides’s point of view. He pawed the laundry bag of cash and said, “This is a solution? How interesting. Can you tell me how? But first, I wanna know what the problem was.”
“That’s easy. You were bad mouthing Ricky.”
“I guess there’s no such thing as freedom of speech. To set the record straight, Ricky stole my fucking girlfriend. I went to talk to him about it and he disrespected me. He didn’t have to do that and he didn’t have to sleep with her.”
“Fuck you,” Durrutti shot. “I didn’t steal nobody. I—”
Maimonides cut him short. “You know what I’m saying, Ephraim. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. You talked behind his back. Better you should kill a man than to dishonor him like that. You have to treat people with respect. R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Because you refused to do that, we did what we had to do. You fuck me. I fuck you.”
Ephraim’s cheeks were pocked with dismay. Losing weight had been accompanied by a loss in self-confidence. He slapped himself in the forehead and asked, “Have I gone insane? So what if I talked behind his back? What is this? A police state? Oy gevalt. I want to live and let live, but this ain’t fair, you no-goodnik.”
“Is that how you see me?” Maimonides said. The laundry bag of money and the briefcase were forgotten. He had his own self-esteem issues. Getting mocked by Rook made him feel every year of prison he’d done and he was speechless.
Ephraim was taken aback by the display of pain in Maimonides. All he wanted was his money. His erstwhile crony was too complicated for him. Too involved. He glanced longingly at Sugar in the Saab. “That’s what you are, ain’t you? You’ve always been that. Since day one. What? You gonna tell me things are different with you nowadays? I think not.”
The floodgates of denial broke open in Maimonides. He said low with anguish, “No, they aren’t. And they never will be. I am who I am. What the hell. But we used to work closely together.”
“That, I don’t know about,” Rook said with genuine regret. “Maybe it’s the mood I’m in, but I don’t recall this close friendship. You must be thinking about some other Ephraim. The Ephraim who had zilch. The Ephraim who sold schlock at the flea market. That Ephraim doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.”
“Screw you,” Maimonides booed. Angered by Rook’s self-absorption, a mud slide of rage seeped into his belly. “Then you have forgotten many things.”
“By necessity,” Ephraim replied. A Muni bus barreled past him with a deafening diesel groan. “I worked with lots of people over the years. Too many. You were one of them. But you know what the past was like for me?”
“What?”
“I was dropping dead from hunger five times a day.” He nodded at Sugar, who was sitting quietly in the Saab’s front seat. “See that ring on her finger? Me and her are getting married. We’re going to Hawaii for two months. We’re going to go do some drinking at the beach. Have a piña colada or whatever. Get a suntan and look at the volcanos.”
The diamond engagement ring on Sugar’s slender hand was large enough to pay the rent on Durrutti’s room at the El Capitán Hotel for a million years. The marriage announcement was a coup d’état in the country of his heart. His inability to maintain a romance with Sugar had been hampered by many things, including himself. News of her upcoming marriage to Rook flummoxed him. Durrutti imagined the two of them making love on a deserted beach in Hawaii and knew he was going to get leukemia from the very thought of it. She gazed at him through the windshield with her eyes telling the whole story. He’d disappointed her. He couldn’t hold a candle next to Ephraim Rook.
Ephraim stuck his head in the Saab’s window and kissed Sugar on the lips.
That was Rook for you. Tasteless. A billboard of self-promotion. Conceited to the point of no return. On a satellite headed to Pluto. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see Sugar’s future. She was with him in the satellite. Just the two of them. The fanaticism on Ephraim’s doughy face said it all. The pin pricks of insecurity in his eyes spoke volumes. A mania translatable in any dialect. Sugar was more than his trophy; she was his church and religion. He was going to nail her to the cross of his devotion.
Maimonides absorbed the lovefest with a sober eye. Broaching the topic of friendship with Ephraim had been in vain. Better he should talk to the monkeys in the zoo about it. He spoke, plain and unaffected. “The problem with you, Rook, is that you want everything your way. You’ve got Durrutti’s girl. You have your money back. But that ain’t enough, is it? You have to congratulate yourself, too. The big advertisement. Just like a fucking nobody who knows he’s nobody.”
That touched a nerve. Ephraim broke off the kiss and showed his capped teeth. “Don’t you ever let up? I don’t want to hear no more out of you!”
Revenge had been long in coming. Later Maimonides would tell people it was kismet. Unable to suppress himself he bonked Rook in the nose with a neat backhand, sending him headlong to the ground, where he landed on his plump duff. The laundry bag slithered off the Seville’s hood and gamboled a few feet in the other direction before hitting the tarmac and popping open.
One hundred dollar bills, clouds of them, sloshed onto the sidewalk in a fluttery, confetti-like trail. Some of the cash wafted in the gutter; more drifted toward Hunt’s Donuts. A band of mariachi musicians saw the money dance around a sewer vent and they chased the paper in their cowboy boots.
Rook sat up and didn’t move. Then he buried his head in his hands and sobbed. It was no different than watching a man expire. Slowly and without grace. Durrutti had a vision in which the accountant was a skeleton collecting dust in a lead-lined coffin. Sugar herself was an old woman, her beauty gone. The barrio was a ghost town; tumbleweeds rolled in and out of vacant storefronts. The banks had been looted. Abandoned cars were overturned on the sidewalk. The El Capitán Hotel was in charred ruins.
Durrutti snagged a glimpse of Sugar as she hurtled out of the Saab to comfort her husband-to-be. Her high heels clacked across the cement. He kept a vigil on her hips as they swayed in the cocktail dress. He was getting seasick from how she moved. Being on Mission Street didn’t help. Maimonides put the attaché case Ephraim had left with them under his arm and said, “You don’t look so well, Ricky. You constipated? C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
August waned into September. Following months of fruitless investigation, Agent Kulak told Durrutti with a straight face that Paul Stevens was never considered a viable suspect. The Fed said he’d known Paul was dead from the start—Durrutti had been baited and manipulated by the cop to draw Jimmy Ramirez into the open.
Ricky did what he was supposed to do and kept his lips sealed. Kulak harassed him, but he said he wouldn’t talk again without a lawyer. The summer seemed to have been a furious dream and he wasn’t sure if any of it had been real.
Maimonides assured him over a monk’s breakfast of black coffee, saltine crackers and margarine and Marlboro cigarettes in Hunt’s Donuts. “Hell, Ephraim Rook and his w
ife are in Hawaii. On Maui. I hear Ephraim has angina. Got it from playing golf. He’s in the hospital. Some honeymoon.”
Durrutti visited Arlo in her room. The exquisite she-boy counseled him as the two of them reclined against dowdy kapok pillows on the bed. “Just because the girl married that old man doesn’t mean you have to stay all depressed. You’ll bring yourself down that way, sweetie. Think of what she did as a gift. She wants money and security? She wants to be a breeder? So do I. But good riddance to both of them, that’s what I say.”
Arlo was sporting a black silk Frederick’s of Holly-wood negligee. A pink boa was draped around her swan’s neck, cascading over her fragile shoulders and falling to her knobby knees. She hadn’t shaved in days; a brown stubble streaked her cheeks, highlighting the pallor on her face.
Her husband was at the sink shaving her head; Jackie’s gigantic skull was covered with a layer of Noxema shaving cream. The rest of her was sheathed in a yellow silk bed sheet that she’d tied around her waist. The Ruger was on the dresser next to an unlit votive candle.
“See,” Arlo said, trying to comfort Durrutti. “When a girl gets tired of a man, it has to do with a lot of things. Money—how much she needs. The future and what she wants from it. Then there’s her history with her daddy and her family’s expectations. And the good times she thinks she has to have and the rest of the goddamn stuff. She might not even know what she wants. Most people don’t. And never will. But I’ve got the antidote to all that nonsense. Brewed just for you. Now do you want this new type of dust that I’ve been talking about? This is truly magical shit. It’ll take you to Sirius.”
Arlo scared up a sherm from her bra and ran the length of it under her nose while claiming, “This motherfucker is vibrating with a unique spiritual power. Can you feel its karma?” She handed it to Durrutti, clicking her fingers and saying in a demanding treble, “That’ll be ten bucks.”
Durrutti forked over the ten spot. While relieving him of his money, one of Arlo’s negligee straps fell off her shoulder, exposing a nipple pierced by two gold rings. She vogued, conscious of Durrutti’s eyes on her. Feeling sympathetic, Arlo reached out and patted his arm indulgently, making a cooing noise. “You be a good girl and smoke that sherm and get some sleep. When you wake up, you’ll feel a whole lot happier.”
Durrutti slinked down the hall to his room, closed the curtains and locked the window. He dragged the dresser across the floor and propped it against the door. He uprooted the mattress from the box springs and put it on the shag carpeting. Then he sat down on the mattress with the sherm, an ashtray and a matchbook.
It was a cozy nest with pillows and a wool Army blanket. Cigarettes in his lap in case he wanted them. He clutched the sherm between his fingers and lit a match. One last smoke and that was it.
He ran the match over the tip of the sherm and inhaled. Before he could push the fumes out his nose, everything went pitch black, as if the electrical power in the El Capitán Hotel had been shut down. He was panic-stricken, but a knock on the window diverted his attention. Durrutti craned his neck to see who it was—a guy was outside on the fire escape. He pointed at himself, then at Durrutti. He gestured at the window’s latch, wanting Durrutti to open it for him.
A closer look at the stranger shortened the Jew’s life by a decade. A short, dark-skinned man with a mop of ebony hair cut across his forehead and dressed in a pair of San Francisco policeman’s combat overalls was kneeling in his own blood. He turned toward Durrutti as the late afternoon sun conjugated his face—there was a bullet hole between his eyebrows. A deep red hole surrounded by a ring of saltpeter.
His eyes were covered with cataracts. The skin around his mouth had been eaten away by worms. A six inch stalactite of spittle hung from his upper lip. His bedraggled cop’s uniform was granulated with whorls of blood. His holster was empty; his badge had been riven from his tunic. He rapped on the pane with both hands and begged Durrutti to let him in.
“It’s me, Chamorro! Open up, will you? Just unlock the fucking window! C’mon, man, I’m freezing my nalgas off out here!”
It was a hundred degrees outside. The sun roasted Mission Street with an intensity that made Durrutti’s throat hoarse and scratchy. Indian summer’s last gasp was the hottest of days. The dead narc pressed the remains of his face against the window and cried. His tears streamed down the pane, splashing on the sill in salty driblets. He talked, not even caring if Durrutti listened.
“You know those little gangsters that hang out by Ritmo Latino? The Mara Salvatrucha? That’s where all this shit began. I set them up by hinting I’d sell dope for them. They thought because we were raza or some bullshit like that, I’d be down with them. They trusted me. We made a deal and I fucked them over. I had to. It was my job. I took their money and then I hauled them off to jail. They didn’t like that. And when I kept some of the cash for myself, that caused a brouhaha. They put a hit out on me. But I never thought they’d kill my ass.”
Durrutti shouted through the closed window. “The cops said Paul Stevens did the shooting.”
Chamorro spat out a tooth and slivers of flesh as he spoke. He was distracted and couldn’t stop fidgeting. Below him, three stories down, was the hum and the bustle of Mission Street. A Public Health Service ambulance was in front of the hotel; two medics were helping an old lady into the back of the van. He said, “Who the fuck is that? I know everybody in this pinche neighborhood and he ain’t on my list.”
“He lived at the All-Star Hotel.” Durrutti didn’t think it would hurt to say more. “For several years.”
“Nothing but dope fiends over there. Who is this guy?”
“He had gray hair and he wore this big overcoat.”
“Oh, the maricon. He shot Bigarani years back, right? Fuck, I hated his guts. The bitch used to give me this stone cold vibe when I’d see him in the street,” Chamorro said. “Thought he was better than me. Shit, he didn’t kill me, I can say that much. He was made into a scapegoat because of that Bigarani thing. You know how the police are. Once you do them wrong, they never forget you. They’ll never let you be. Even when you’re history. That’s the way of the world and it ain’t never gonna be any different.”
Chamorro continued his yarn. “After the bust I didn’t see the little fuckers for weeks. Making bail must have been a bitch for them. Then one night the homeboys said they wanted to speak with me. They sent a messenger. A pinche pelon called Lonely Boy. He met me at Taqueria El Toro on Seventeenth Street. I was in there trying to grab something to eat and he tells me a meeting is planned for later that night down on Mission Street. I think, cool. Now the shit’s gonna hit the fan. But I had those punks by their cojones so I wasn’t too worried. The funky thing was, when I got to the spot where we’re suppose to have this chat, there ain’t nobody around. There ain’t no meeting. So I waited.”
While he told his tale, he kneeled on the fire escape, his hands on the guard railing. Every time he made a sudden move, the nickel-plated handcuffs on his gun belt jangled. His ammunition clips creaked in their leather pouches.
“I was just standing there by Hunt’s Donuts waiting for the homeboys. It was a pretty night. Sort of cold. Patches of grayish fog. The sky was getting all purple with the wind blowing. The air was fresh and clean. People were going to Bruno’s and all these fucking white dudes in their BMW’s were cruising the street. Everybody was dressed up to the nines and feeling good.
“Then these two guys come up to me. They had their hoodies down over their eyes so I couldn’t see their faces. They motioned for me to step into a doorway with them. Something about it didn’t feel right. But what the hell, I did it anyway. I figured ain’t nobody gonna mess with a cop.
“The next thing you know, the first guy pins my arms from behind. The other guy steps up to me and sticks a gun between my eyes. I can’t say anything because I’ve got this pistol on me. All I remember is the look in the homie’s eyes, just a zombie. He squeezed the trigger and kapow, I got a bullet in me. I’m ho
t, then I’m cold, real cold. And then, fuck, it was over. I was shit.”
The narc’s tormented face was no more than a few inches away from Durrutti. His breath misted the window between them, getting the pane specky with blood as he hunkered down on his knees. “Just before I went under, one homeboy said to the other one, get rid of the gun. Throw the fucker in the bay. Then someone else came up to me. I thought it was a priest. Somebody to give me last rites. I was so thankful I began to weep. But it wasn’t no Catholic priest. Nobody was there to save my soul. It was none of that shit. It was that loco Lonely Boy. He kicked me in the leg and let out a horselaugh like he was stoned or whatever. He got down on one knee and opened my mouth and stuck a dead rat in my throat and said, tu madre. And that’s the end of it—they tossed the gun off the Bay Bridge. No evidence and no witnesses. What else can I tell you? I got shafted. Fuck it all.”
Durrutti closed his eyes and bit down on his tongue to keep from screaming. When he opened them, Chamorro had retired from sight. The fire escape was deserted, save for a ceramic pot of sunburned lobelia. Nothing remained of the narc, not a trace. No shreds of his uniform and no blood. A slight electric tingle passed through his fingers—the only clue the cop had ever been there at all.
He belly flopped onto the mattress, sure he had laid eyes on the murdered man. He was overheated, certain he had a fever. The walls in the room undulated; the carpet was alive with cockroaches. He recalled how he and Sugar used to make love, that when she came, he’d always smiled. She never saw this and he regretted it. There would be no sleep for him. Not now, not ever. He stayed awake throughout the night and listened to a police car’s siren have a nervous breakdown on Mission Street.
