Condemned

by John Nicholas Iannuzzi

  Paco took a small, solid rubber headed mallet that hung from a nail nearby. “Here, hit it with this.”

  Nichols took the mallet and gave the wall an easy hit. He nodded appreciatively. Paco took the mallet and gave the wall a substantial hit. The sound was dead solid.

  “They had to be solid, thick,” said Paco. “When the prohibition agents came down, they wouldn’t be fooled by walls that were paper thin or hollow sounding.”

  “There’s something behind this wall?” said Nichols. “How’d anybody move it?”

  “Watch,” said Paco. He reached up to a nail that protruded from the side of the wall above their heads. Pulling on the nail-head, Paco removed a long, thin shaft of sturdy, flexible metal, about three feet long. Raising the metal to a small imperfection in the cement, Paco inserted the metal shaft deep into the imperfection. When the metal shaft penetrated almost its entire length, there was a click, and the wall—about twenty inches thick—swung. “The wall is hinged, on very heavy hinges, like a bank vault. With the wall in place, no one would know there’s something behind it. When the mechanism is tripped, the wall swings open.”

  Behind where the wall had been, there were wooden booths, a small table, a bar against a wall, bottles of booze on shelves behind the bar. “All the comforts of home away from home,” smiled Paco.

  “Wow!” said Nichols, walking around the small drinking area. “Anybody ever busted down here, when they had Prohibition?”

  “Probably,” Paco shrugged.

  “Imagine, in the old days, people bein’ put in the Can for supplyin’ bathtub gin down here, and nowadays everybody’s doing it legally upstairs, right over our heads. Nobody gets busted for makin’ illegal booze anymore, do they?” Nichols asked Becker.

  “Why would a bootlegger bother; nobody’d drink bathtub stuff when they can go to their local liquor store and buy all the Seagrams or Stoli they want, cheaper than a bootlegger could make it.”

  Nichols laughed. “If drugs ever became legal, the Cocaine Corporation of America’d put The Brotherhood out of business.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Mr. Nichols, not going to happen,” said Becker, shaking his head.

  “Maybe. The people with prohibition probably never thought booze was going to be legal again,” said Nichols.

  “Big business is already into drugs—”

  “Say what?”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” said Becker. Big business is involved in keeping drugs exactly as they are: illegal. Every government in the world spends billions on drug enforcement; almost half of every police force in the world, every court system, every jail system, which means every weapons manufacturer, every car company, oil company, food processing companies, all have an interest in keeping things exactly the way they are.”

  “Now that you put it that way,” said Nichols.

  “Let’s have one more upstairs, for old times sake,” said Becker.

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Nichols. “Paco, if you’ll lead the way.”

  “My pleasure, gentlemen.” Paco deftly snared a twenty from Nichols, pushed the wall-door back into place, slid the shaft of metal back into the hole in the wall, and preceded the two men to the stairs going up.

  Bensonhurst: August 28, 1996 : 7:30 P.M.

  “This is bizarre,” Sandro said to Tatiana as they drove toward the Prospero Funeral Parlor in Bensonhurst, “a wake and a memorial service for two friends on the same night.”

  “I am very sorry,” Tatiana said, rubbing Sandro’s shoulder as he drove. “It is bad enough when one person is gone, but two at the same time is terrible.”

  “What makes it stranger is that both their deaths occurred by other than natural means, both had to do with drugs, and both had something to do with Russians.”

  “I know about Red Hardie and the Russians. But why do you think Tony’s death”—Tatiana refused to use Tony Balls’ entire sobriquet—“had anything to do with Russians?”

  “I talked to his wife on the phone, to offer her any help. You know he shot himself while they were having a telephone conversation—”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Tony told Vickie that the D.E.A. picked him up because an informant put the D.E.A. onto some Russians, and while following the Russians around, they observed Tony Balls and decided to start following him.”

  They were now near the funeral home where Tony Balls was laid out. Sandro parked the car about a block away. “See the men standing in front of the funeral parlor,” Sandro asked as they walked toward the entrance. Tatiana nodded. “They’re friends.”

  “I would think that Tony’s friends would come.”

  “I don’t mean friends, in the ordinary sense of the word. I mean friends from the life that he led, from what the police would call organized crime.”

  “These people are criminals?” asked Tatiana.

  “At least the police think they are. And see across the street, there are two vans, one at each end of the block?”

  Tatiana turned her gaze across the street from the funeral parlor, nodding.

  “Inside are D.E.A. agents or Task Force agents,” said Sandro, “taking pictures of all the people who arrive, and of these men on the sidewalk.”

  “These are old men” Tatiana said as they walked closer to the entrance to the funeral parlor.

  “Dinosaurs, men who used to roam large in the world, relics of the past”

  “How can it be a secret if you know about it?” Said Tatiana.

  “Everyone knows about it,” said Sandro. “These men on the sidewalk are no longer dangerous organized criminals—but they like to think they are, The Agents are not spying on criminal activity of any importance, but they like to think they are. This is just a game.”

  “Why do they play, if everyone knows it is a game?”

  “The friends play because it makes them feel like they’re still important. The Agents play because the Agents have no capacity to infiltrate, put a mole inside the Russian or Chinese or Arab gangs, so their bosses have them continuing the same old investigation of the same old men over and over. This way, the public thinks they’re really earning their pay check, staying on top of things, when in fact, they’re just watching old men die away.”

  “Why aren’t these Agents into the war on drugs instead?” said Tatiana.

  “The war on drugs is like a boat,” said Sandro. “You know what a boat is, don’t you.”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” smiled Tatiana.

  “A boat is just a hole in the ocean that you throw your money into. We’ve been pouring billions of dollars into some socalled war on drugs, and what’s happening? Hidden drugs brought in every day, in furniture, couriers who swallowed condoms of it, crime, violence, illegal money from drugs going out, every day; some of it is seized, most of it is not. Every time they arrest two, two more money hungry creeps take up the business because there’s so much money in it. What’s really stupid is that Joe Galiber’s bill—to legalize drugs—would put drug trafficking in the same memory bank as Prohibition—overnight. They can’t make money at it, they’re not going to do it.”

  “What about all the people who have their heads all, you know—who put those things up their noses,” asked Tatiana. “Legalizing drugs isn’t going to change them—they’ll still need drugs, so they’ll find someone else to buy it from.”

  “They’ll be able to get drugs, legally, at reasonable prices, just like we buy vodka. Those who overdo it, will be medical problems, like alcoholics, not criminals. Bobby Kennedy once posed a question: if you have a choice between injustice or disorder, which would you pick?”

  Tatiana thought. “I don’t know. Which?”

  “In an orderly society, we can deal with injustice. If there’s disorder, we can’t deal with anything.”

  “What does that have to do with drugs?” asked Tatiana.

  “Where you have trafficking, you have disorder, crime, you can’t deal with the addicts. If we
were to eradicate trafficking, we’d have an orderly atmosphere where we could deal with addicts, help them, cure them—maybe. At least we wouldn’t have trafficking.”

  Tatiana nodded, not totally convinced, but pensive. “Why are people against legalizing it, then?”

  “For the same reason traffickers traffic—money. Fighting drugs is as big a business as smuggling drugs.”

  “This is crazy,” said Tatiana.

  “It is indeed, and we are condemned to endure it.”

  “Hello, Counselor,” nodded a couple of the men on the sidewalk in front of the funeral parlor.

  “Hello.”

  “Smile for the camera, Miss,” one of the men said to Tatiana.

  The others laughed.

  One of the men made a vulgar gesture toward the vans.

  They laughed again.

  Within the funeral parlor, the atmosphere was both somber and ostentatious. Somber because the women of Tony Balls’ family, his wife Vickie and daughter Theresa—Flor, of course, was not there; she would have to mourn and be comforted by her friends elsewhere—were distraught as they sat in a front row of chairs, comforted by a phalanx of other women, all entirely in black, receiving the condolences of relatives and friends. Ostentatious because elaborate flower arrangements were continually arriving, filling the front and side walls of Parlor A, and spilling over into empty Parlor B. The friends, after paying momentary, awkward respect as they stared in silence at the casket, trying to see if the gun shot wound was visible, inspected the collection of flower pieces, first to see if the flower piece they contributed was elaborate and prominent enough, then to see who else sent which flowers. After that, the friends went out to the sidewalk to mingle, smoke, reminisce, and to hurl insults at the government vans.

  Vickie Spacavento, who had married Tony when she was 17, was seated as a continual line of visitors approached her chair and offered their condolence.

  “I’m very sorry,” Sandro said as he approached Vickie.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said blandly, apparently groggy from being at the funeral parlor greeting mourners for the third day. She looked up momentarily. “Oh, it’s you, Sandro. My God, I didn’t even recognize you.” She stood and hugged him, kissing him on the cheek. “Don’t mind my breath, I haven’t—”

  “Vickie, please—If there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “You were always a good friend—” She glanced at the casket and shook her head sadly. “He knew you could take care of anything for him. Why, Tony, why did you do this to us?” she said softly toward Tony Balls. “Sandro could have taken care of this.”

  Vickie shook Tatiana’s hand. “Thank you for coming. You’re Sandro’s friend?”

  Tatiana nodded and offered a comforting smile.

  “I don’t know, you know. Why men have to do these things, they go off and leave us alone, they don’t think about that—” She turned and took her daughter Theresa’s arm, reminding her to say hello to Sandro. Vickie, then Theresa, glanced at the casket, their eyes welling up. Tatiana embraced Vickie, then Theresa, and said something in Vickie’s ear which took a long time to say. When Tatiana finished, Vickie looked in Tatiana’s face and nodded and smiled sadly. “You’re right. Thank you.”

  Vickie turned to Sandro. “Tony told me I should be sure to give you back your brief case. He had it at the house when those bastards came to arrest him.”

  “I had asked him to hold it for me, I was going to an appointment and didn’t want to carry it.”

  “When they came,” Vickie continued, “he was in his underwear. He’s lucky they gave him time to dress. I brought the bag with me. It’s in the cloak room.”

  “I’ll pick it up on the way out. Was there a pen, too?”

  “Oh, my God, there was. He said there was a pen that it was inside the brief case. Oh, I’m sorry, Sandro—my head—”

  “No problem,” said Sandro.

  “He said it was very important. Is it an heirloom?”

  “It’s actually—” Sandro leaned forward to Vickie “—a recorder we were using.”

  Vickie stared in Sandro’s eyes. She smiled. “I hope he got those bastards who were with him when this happened saying something on it.”

  “Don’t forget, if you need anything—”

  “I know that, and thank you, Sandro.” Mourners were gathering in a knot behind them. Sandro and Tatiana moved on.

  Once back in the car, Tatiana driving, Sandro opened the attache case and played the tape. The voices that were there were the voices of people in Li’l Bit’s neighborhood, the people in and around the bodega on Avenue C, the people who lived in the building where Li’l Bit lived. When the voices stopped, Sandro let the tape play until there were no further voices or sounds.

  “Are those recordings important?” asked Tatiana.

  “Not really. These are recordings of the people we interviewed in Alphabet City together.”

  “Maybe he said it was important so you would have it back.”

  “I guess.” Sandro paused, watching a small oil tanker, its water line high out of the waters of the Narrows. “I had hoped he had recorded some of his last conversations when he was in D.E.A. custody. He told his wife something about Russians and Red Hardie, and a rat—I thought maybe the recording would put some light on these confusing, disparate facts.”

  Sandro watched the road ahead as Tatiana drove along the Gowanus Parkway. “What were you whispering to Vickie back there” he said, turning to Tatiana.

  “She was wondering why Tony did such a foolish thing, that left his family without a father. I explained why men do reckless things that seem very foolish to women.”

  “Oh? What did you tell her?” said Sandro.

  “I told her that there is a Russian expression: in life, there are little women—meaning children—medium sized women—girls—and big women, and then there are little boys, medium sized boys, and big boys. That’s the way it is, and why men doing reckless, childish things which women do not understand.”

  Sandro studied the side of Tatiana’s face as she drove. She turned to glance at him momentarily. “That’s really the way it is.” She shrugged.

  The Memorial Service for Red Hardie was held in a Baptist Church on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, north of 125th Street in Harlem. A line of black people stood on the sidewalk, moving slowly toward the entrance to pay their respects.

  “Notice, there are no D.E.A. vans here,” said Sandro.

  Tatiana looked along the avenue. “Why in Brooklyn, but not over here?” asked Tatiana.

  “Maybe it’s easier for the ‘Man’ to put together a dog and pony show of the more traditional criminal figures than rooting out black suspects.”

  At Sandro’s direction, Tatiana brought the car to a stop just outside the church. As soon as Sandro exited the car, Anton Taylor came over and shook his hand. “Hello, Mr. Luca,” he said, nodding to Tatiana. “Leave the car. Half Pint,” he called to a short man with a cap, “park the lawyer’s car.”

  “Come on inside,” said Taylor, walking ahead of Sandro past the line of mourners. Money Dozier stood just inside the entrance. Judge Ellis had postponed his surrender date long enough that he could attend the memorial services.

  “Hello, Sandro,” said Money as Sandro entered the back of the church. His voice was low, rumbling with grief. “Hello, Miss,” he said to Tatiana.

  Red’s ex-wife Leslie and her husband had come in from Pennsylvania. She was seated in one of the pews in front, greeting old friends and mourners. Her husband was seated next to her. When Leslie saw Sandro and Tatiana, she rose and walked over to them, shaking hands with Sandro, kissing him in on the cheek. Tatiana hugged Leslie. Then Sandro and Tatiana walked toward one corner at the back of the church. Money accompanied them.

  “I’m really sorry about Red,” Sandro said to Money. “He was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was. Yes he was, Mr. Luca. He was a good friend, too. To both of us. He really liked you. Let’s get us
some fresh air,” he said. “It’s kind of stuffy in here with all the folks coming in.” Sandro walked with Money out to the sidewalk. Upon seeing Money, the crowd parted, giving Money and the two white people a circle of their own space.

  “Miss Leslie was telling me that you were there, at her house, when Red met his death,” said Money. “You, too, Miss.”

  “Yes,” said Sandro. “We were there. Red tried to lure the killers away from the house, from Miss Leslie and us.”

  “That would be Mr. Red, gave his life to save others.” Money nodded in a reverie of thought.

  “That’s exactly what he did,” agreed Sandro.

  “Miss Leslie was also tellin’ me that the people who come to the house with the guns, they was talking a foreign language.”

  “Russian,” said Sandro.

  “Russian? Mmm, mmm, Russian. I never knew Mr. Red to know no Russian folks.”

  “They were Russian, for sure,” said Sandro. “Tatiana is Russian. She understood what they were saying.”

  “Mmm, mmm,” mused Money. “You know—Half Pint, hey, Half Pint,” Money called to the man in the cap. “Go inside and find Matthew, you know, Matthew the waiter—”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Money.”

  “You know,” said Money reflectively, “a time back, Matthew was at the Flash Inn—Matthew’s a waiter there—and he was telling me that some people talking a foreign language—not I-talian or Spanish—were there speaking with Red’s nephew.”

  “Red had some things to say about Awgust when we were in the house, just before he went out,” said Sandro. “Seemed to think he might have been involved with the Russians, based on something that you had told him.”

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Money?” said a short man with grey hair.

  “Yes, yes, Matthew, this here is Mr. Red’s lawyer, Mr. Luca, and his lady.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Matthew, shaking Sandro’s hand, nodding his head to Tatiana.

  “It was Matthew put me on to the situation in the first place,” said Money. “Tell them, Matthew, about the time that there was some people in the Flash, talking”—at this point, Money lowered his voice—”to Awgust Nichols, and they were talkin’ a foreign tongue.”